Northwestern chemistry Prof. James Gaynor received the 2025 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, accompanied by a $875,000 grant over the span of five years to continue his research.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation awards innovative early-career junior faculty in science and engineering disciplines. The foundation accepts two candidates each from 50 schools for the fellowship, choosing 20 total recipients. Gaynor said NU has its own internal application process across all science and engineering disciplines to select the University’s candidates.
As a member of the International Institute of Nanotechnology and the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Energy and Sustainability, Gaynor said he researches the fundamental electron movement events at the molecular and material scale. The professor’s work impacts functionality in devices like batteries, semiconducting and solar panels.
The grant money is “transformative” for Gaynor, he said, and allows him to expand his operation with crucial “ultra-fast laser-based equipment” and recruiting new researchers to build a new branch within the research group.
“Especially in today’s scientific research funding climate, the flexibility and the freedom that the Packard Foundation funding allows is really going to transform our ability to go for really high risk, high reward projects, to really go after knowledge that could shift paradigms in terms of how we think about chemical events,” Gaynor said.
He hopes to expand his work in attochemistry, examining how the chemical process can be controlled starting with the movement of electrons. Gaynor called it the “next frontier of photochemical research.”
Gaynor said he is motivated by training the next generation of scientists while watching excitement and discovery first-hand in the lab. On top of that, he said his work allows him to explore new things with profound consequences.
“There’s a million other things that I could have ended up doing, but I got the chance to be able to do this,” Gaynor said. “And so the uniqueness and the excitement of being able to do that is an infinite fuel for the fire. It just keeps burning.”
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