Katharine Page is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and a Joint Faculty member with the Neutron Scattering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She works at the intersection of energy materials research and the advancement of x-ray and neutron scattering methods. This includes ventures to understand and control local to long-range ordering in complex ceramics, energy conversion materials, and nanoscale catalysts, among other topics. She received her PhD in 2008 from the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow and an Instrument Scientist at the Lujan Neutron Scattering Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory through 2014, and then an Instrument Scientist within the Diffraction Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory until 2019. She has published over 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, delivered over 50 invited talks, and organized dozens of workshops, schools and tutorial sessions on scattering techniques for the scientific community. She is a recipient of the Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Award, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). She is currently a co-Principal Investigator in the HEISs DOE Energy Frontier Research Center as well as an Integrated Research Group Deputy Leader within UTK’s MRSEC: Center for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (CAMM). Kate lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with her husband, Dr. Michael Crowell, and their children, Wriston (age 12) and Abbie (age 7).
Dr. Raymond Schaak is the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Chemistry Department at Penn State University. Dr. Schaak also has a Courtesy appointment in the Chemical Engineering Department at Penn State and is part of the Penn State Materials Research Institute. Dr. Schaak received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Lebanon Valley College in 1998. In 2001, he received a Ph.D. in materials chemistry from Penn State University under the direction of Professor Thomas Mallouk, where he demonstrated the concept of solid-state retrosynthesis for the stepwise and predictable topotactic synthesis of bulk and nanostructured perovskite oxide materials. From 2001–2003, he was a postdoctoral research associate with Professor Robert Cava at Princeton University, where he worked on the synthesis and physical property characterization of metal carbide, boride, phosphide, oxide, and alloy superconductors. In 2003, Dr. Schaak began his independent career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. In 2007, he moved to Penn State University as an Associate Professor of Chemistry and was promoted to Professor in 2011. Dr. Schaak was appointed as the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry in 2013. His research group focuses on developing new chemical strategies for the synthesis of bulk and nanoscale solid-state materials and applying these materials to problems at the forefront of modern materials research, including heterogeneous catalysis for energy applications. Dr. Schaak has received several prestigious awards, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (1999), an NSF CAREER Award (2006), a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2006), a DuPont Young Professor Grant (2006), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (2007), a Research Corporation Scialog Award for Solar Energy Conversion (2010), the National Fresenius Award (2011), the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in the Physical Sciences (2012), the ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award (2016), the ACS Akron Section Award (2020), and the F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry (2025). In 2017, Dr. Schaak was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and in 2022, Dr. Schaak received the Lebanon Valley College Distinguished Alumnus Award, which is one of LVC’s highest honors. Dr. Schaak served as Awards Committee co-chair of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Inorganic Chemistry (ACS DIC) from 2007–2011 and as chair of the ACS DIC Nanoscience subdivision in 2013. Dr. Schaak also served on the Cottrell Scholar Selection Committee of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of Solid State Chemistry and is both an Associate Editor of ACS Nano (since 2010) and the inaugural Deputy Editor of ACS Nanoscience Au, which launched in 2021.
Alannah Hallas is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia, a Principal Investigator at the Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, and the Co-Director of CIFAR’s Quantum Materials Program. She completed her PhD in 2017 at McMaster University followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University. Alannah holds a Sloan Research Fellowship (2023-2025), and she was awarded the IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize in the field of Magnetism in 2023. Alannah’s research focuses on the discovery and crystal growth of new quantum materials and their study using a range of neutron, x-ray, and muon techniques.
Dr. Zachary Mansley is a postdoctoral research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory working on the m2M#s EFRC as an electron microscopist and materials scientist with Dr. Esther Takeuchi, Dr. Amy Marschilok, and Dr. Yimei Zhu. He received his Ph.D. in 2021 from Northwestern University under the advisement of Prof. Laurence Marks, heavily collaborating with Prof. Kenneth Poeppelmeier. His B.S. in Materials Science was earned from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015, performing research under Prof. Paul Salvador. His current work focuses on using electron microscopy techniques to uncover structure-property-performance relationships in energy materials, particularly high entropy oxides.
