Assistant Professor Alexander Spokoyny has been awarded a 2016 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.
The award recognizes outstanding new faculty who excel in research, experience, & academic leadership. Prof. Spokoyny was recognized for his work on developing new materials and synthetic methods using boron cluster compounds.
For over 25 years, the award has been given to help young faculty achieve tenure while teaching and conducting research. The company’s Research and Development Community, in partnership with 3M’s Corporate Giving Program, administer the award. Recipients are nominated by 3M researchers.
Prof. Spokoyny joined the UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry faculty in 2014. He attended UCLA as an undergraduate, where he was introduced to the area of boron cluster chemistry working as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratory of Prof. M. Frederick Hawthorne. He continued his graduate chemistry education at Northwestern University under the guidance of Prof. Chad A. Mirkin. At Northwestern, Prof. Spokoyny developed new materials, devices, and fundamentally new classes of ligand platforms based on organomimetic carborane clusters. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 2011, he was an NIH Post-Doctoral Fellow working in the laboratories of Profs. Stephen L. Buchwald and Bradley L. Pentelute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There his research interests involved the development of new bioconjugation strategies for peptides and proteins and regulation of protein-protein interactions. For more information about Prof. Spokoyny’s research, visit his research website. Update: The news was reported by UCLA Newsroom in the Faculty Bulletin Board section.
