A Beckman Fellow receives funding, usually via an intermediary institution, from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, [1] founded by Arnold Orville Beckman and his wife Mabel. The Foundation supports programs at several institutions to encourage research, particularly the work of young researchers who might not be eligible for other sources of funding. [2] People from a variety of different programs at different institutions may therefore be referred to as Beckman Fellows. Though most often designating postdoctoral awards in science, the exact significance of the term will vary depending on the institution involved and the type(s) of Beckman Fellowship awarded at that institution.
The Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship program was sponsored by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation to support research at US institutions in the biological and chemical sciences. A total of sixty Fellowships were awarded from 2015 – 2017. [3] After an evaluation in 2018, the Foundation then relaunched the program for 2019 as the Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemical Sciences or Chemical Instrumentation. [4] The purpose of the program is to support advanced research by postdoctoral scholars in fundamental chemistry research or the development of chemical instrumentation.
The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign offers a variety of fellowship programs. [5]
Beckman Graduate Fellowships are awarded to students at the University of Illinois who are working at the master's or doctorate level. [5] [6] [7] Students propose interdisciplinary research projects involving at least two University of Illinois faculty members, at least one of whom is associated with the Beckman Institute. The award provides funding at the level of a 50% Graduate Research Assistantship for eleven months. [8]
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Evan Anderson Elizabeth Bello Bashar Emon Rong "Ronny" Guo Nil Parikh Amanda Weiss Yuxuan "Richard" Xie
Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowships are awarded to recent Ph.D.'s who receive 3-year appointments at the Beckman Institute, including both a stipend and a research budget. They must be doing interdisciplinary research in an area of research relevant to the Beckman Institute. [9] The first Beckman postdoctoral fellows were Efrat Shimshoni [10] [11] (condensed matter physics) and Andrew Nobel [12] (information theory and statistics) in 1992. [10] : 66
Since the founding of the original Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellows Program, two similar programs have been initiated: the Carle Foundation Hospital-Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellows Program (begun in 2008 and jointly funded by the Carle Foundation Hospital of Urbana, Illinois) and the Beckman-Brown Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellowship (begun in 2015 by an endowment from the Arnold O. and Mabel M. Beckman Foundation made in honor of Theodore L. Brown, founding director of the Beckman Institute). [13]
The following researchers are or have been Beckman Postdoctoral Fellows. The institution listed is the one from which the person had received a Ph.D. Fellowships were awarded as of the year listed. [5] [14] [15]
Beckman Senior Fellowships are awarded to senior faculty from other institutions, who come to the University of Illinois to collaborate with researchers there, usually for a short period of three to six months. [5] [84] Beckman Senior Fellows include: [84]
In addition to the Beckman Fellowships administered through the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation supports additional programs through the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [87] The CAS awards a series of Beckman Fellowships and Beckman Research Awards which support faculty at Urbana-Champaign in their research activities. These awards were funded through an endowment from Arnold and Mabel Beckman, given in the late 1970s, prior to the establishment of the Beckman Institute. They are administered separately and are awarded in departments throughout the university, not just within the sciences. [10] : 3–4
The Center for Advanced Study (CAS) has awarded Beckman Fellowships to the following University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty members, [87] with their home department and Fellowship award year shown.
The Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine in the Stanford School of Medicine was funded in part by $12 million from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, approximately one-fifth of the costs for the new center. It opened in May 1989. [93] The Beckman Fellows program was established in 1999 to support young researchers. Recipients include: [94]
In 2000, the Beckman Institute at Caltech in Pasadena received a grant from the Beckman Foundation to support Beckman Postgraduate Fellowships for five years. Fellowships were for a three-year period. [97] The following people have been recipients: [98]
The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation supported construction of The Gavin Herbert Eye Institute at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. The facility is designed specifically for ease of use by low-vision patients. The institute opened in 2013, and as of Feb. 12, 2013, was awarded a grant for fellowships by the Beckman Foundation. [110]
Arnold Orville Beckman was an American chemist, inventor, investor, and philanthropist. While a professor at California Institute of Technology, he founded Beckman Instruments based on his 1934 invention of the pH meter, a device for measuring acidity, later considered to have "revolutionized the study of chemistry and biology". He also developed the DU spectrophotometer, "probably the most important instrument ever developed towards the advancement of bioscience". Beckman funded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first silicon transistor company in California, thus giving rise to Silicon Valley. After retirement, he and his wife Mabel (1900–1989) were numbered among the top philanthropists in the United States.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. It is the flagship institution of the University of Illinois system and was established in 1867. With over 59,000 students, the University of Illinois is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the United States.
Thomas Eugene Everhart FREng is an American educator and physicist. His area of expertise is the physics of electron beams. Together with Richard F. M. Thornley he designed the Everhart–Thornley detector. These detectors are still in use in scanning electron microscopes, even though the first such detector was made available as early as 1956.
The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dedicated to interdisciplinary research. A gift from scientist, businessman, and philanthropist Arnold O. Beckman (1900–2004) and his wife Mabel (1900–1989) led to the building of the Institute which opened in 1989. It is one of five institutions which receive support from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation on an ongoing basis. Current research at Beckman involves the areas of molecular engineering, intelligent systems, and imaging science. Researchers in these areas work across traditional academic boundaries in scientific projects that can lead to the development of real-world applications in medicine, industry, electronics, and human health across the lifespan.
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) is the largest college of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The college was established in 1913 through the merger of the College of Literature and Arts and the College of Science. The college offers seventy undergraduate majors, as well as master's and Ph.D. programs. As of 2020, there are nearly 12,000 undergraduate students and 2,500 graduate students attending the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Brian Leeds DeMarco is a physicist and professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2005 he placed first in the quantum physics portion of the "Amazing Light" competition honoring Charles Townes, winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics. DeMarco is currently conducting experiments in quantum simulation.
Todd J. Martínez is a David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and a Professor of Photon Science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Douglas L. Jones is the William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as well as the leader of the Biosystems Design research theme in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. His research focuses on directed evolution, metabolic engineering, bioinformatics and high throughput technologies.
Mark Christopher Hersam is a professor of Chemistry and Materials Science Engineering at Northwestern University (2000–present) who, according to the National Science Foundation, has made "major breakthrough[s]" in the field of nanotechnology. He is a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award and a 1996 Marshall Scholar. He is also an Executive Editor of ACS Nano. As of October 2023, he has been cited over 68,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Martin Gruebele is a German-born American physical chemist and biophysicist who is currently emeritus James R. Eiszner Chair in Chemistry, Professor of Physics, Professor of Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) is an interdisciplinary facility for genomics research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Institute was built in 2006 to centralize biotechnology research at the University of Illinois. Current research at the IGB explores the genomic bases of a wide range of phenomena, including the progression of cancer, the ecological impact of global change, tissue and organ growth, and the diversity of animal behavior.
Jeffrey Scott Moore is the Murchison-Mallory Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He has received awards for both teaching and research, and as of 2014, was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. In 2017, he was named director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, after serving as Interim Director for one year.
Lawrence B. Schook was the vice president for research at the University of Illinois. He oversaw the $1 billion research portfolio across all three campuses. A scholar in comparative genomics and the exploitation of genomic diversity to understand traits and disease, Dr. Schook focuses his research on genetic resistance to disease, regenerative medicine, and using genomics to create animal models for biomedical research. He led the international pig genome-sequencing project, which produced a draft of the pig genome allowing researchers to offer insights into diseases that afflict pigs and humans.
CatherineJ. Murphy is an American chemist and materials scientist, and is the Larry Faulkner Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The first woman to serve as the head of the department of chemistry at UIUC, Murphy is known for her work on nanomaterials, specifically the seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanorods of controlled aspect ratio. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Nancy Makri is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where she is the principal investigator of the Makri Research Group for the theoretical understanding of condensed phase quantum dynamics. She studies theoretical quantum dynamics of polyatomic systems, and has developed methods for long-time numerical path integral simulations of quantum dissipative systems.
Theodore Lawrence Brown is an American scientist known for research, teaching, and writing in the field of physical inorganic chemistry, a university administrator, and a philosopher of science. In addition to his research publications, Brown has written textbooks on general chemistry and science communication which have been published in multiple languages and used in multiple countries. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has also held the administrative positions of vice chancellor for research and dean of the graduate college (1980–1986). He is the founding director emeritus of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
Michael Steven Strano is an American chemical engineer and the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is particularly interested in quantum-confined materials. Strano was appointed editor-in-chief of Carbon in 2016. In 2017, Strano was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering "for contributions to nanotechnology, including fluorescent sensors for human health and solar and thermal energy devices."
Tan Weihong is a Chinese chemist. He is the University of Florida Distinguished Professor, V. T. and Louise Jackson Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida, and also the Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Professor of Biology, and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics at Hunan University in China. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015 and The World Academy of Sciences in 2016.
Liviu M. Mirica is the Janet and William H. Lycan Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, known for his work in organometallic chemistry and nickel-based catalysis. He was elected in 2018 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and in 2022 as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research interests include using synthetic, inorganic and organometallic chemistry to study novel transition metal complexes with applications for sustainable catalysis. He has also worked on developing bifunctional diagnostic and therapeutic agents for amyloid-beta-related disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, while continuing to investigate the roles of transition metal ions in neurodegenerative diseases.