Faraday Medal winner to speak April 25 at WWU

Chemist Reginald Penner, the Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and chair of the UCI Department of Chemistry, will visit the Western Washington University campus Friday, April 25.

Penner will be the guest speaker at the dedication of the Advanced Materials Science and Engineering Center's newly renovated laboratories on campus.

Before his keynote lecture at 4 p.m., which will take place in Academic Instructional Center West Room 204, Penner will attend the AMSEC open house from 2:30 to 4:00 in Environmental Studies Rooms 128 to 131. A dedication ceremony for the space will take place at 3:15.

In his lecture, Penner will discuss how metal nanowires can function as chemical sensors that are fast, sensitive, rugged, cheap and extremely power efficient. These are the conclusions of Penner's recent work on sensors for ammonia and hydrogen gas.

After Penner's lecture, an invitation-only reception will be held in the AW skybridge.

Penner attended Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minn., where he obtained bachelor's degrees in chemistry and biology in 1983. He studied at Texas A&M University beginning in 1983 with Professor Charles Martin and he received a doctorate in chemistry in 1987. He proceeded to postdoctoral appointments at Stanford University and Caltech, working with Professor Nate Lewis, before being appointed at UCI in 1990. Penner is an electrochemist whose research group develops methods based upon electrodeposition for making nanomaterials, such as nanowires, composed of metals and semiconductors. With his students, he has more than 150 research publications to date. He is an A.P. Sloan Fellow, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, an NSF and ONR Young Investigator and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the 2009 Faraday Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry of the UK.