Alumnus Rafal Dziedzic (PhD ’19 Spokoyny group) has been named as a recipient of the 2020 ACS-DIC Young Investigator Award.
Rafal was recognized by the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Inorganic Chemistry (DIC) for his work research he conducted with Professor Alex Spokoyny during his Ph.D. studies at UCLA. He will participate in the DIC Young Investigator Symposium on August 16, 2020, at the Fall ACS National Meeting in San Francisco where he will present the research he carried out during his Ph.D. studies and his current work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) working with Dr. Brett A. Helms. He will receive a $1,000 honorarium and a plaque to commemorate his participation in the event.
As a chemistry undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rafal conducted research with Professor Song Jin doing electrochemistry and nanomaterial synthesis. Because of this research experience, Rafal was selected for the AFRL 2014 Space Scholars Program. During that summer he worked on developing reversible electrochemical mirror devices that could operate in space vehicles.
In the Fall of 2014, Rafal joined the Spokony group at UCLA as a chemistry graduate student. He was selected for the AFRL 2015 Space Scholars Program to work on the development of devices for space vehicles and spent the summer doing research as a paid intern at New Mexico’s Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque. That same year he received a 2015 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP). In 2016, Rafal received a National Defense Science & Engineering (NDSEG) graduate fellowship.
At the UCLA commencement events in June 2019, Dr. Rafal Dziedzic with his Ph.D. advisor Professor Alex Spokoyny. (GradImages)
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
