USD Chemist Earns American Chemical Society Junior Faculty Award
Bess Vlaisavljevich, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry at the University of South Dakota, received an OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty award from the Computers in Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society. The competitive award identifies top junior faculty in computational chemistry and modeling.
Vlaisavljevich joined USD’s chemistry faculty in 2017 and has received more than $1.2 million in federal grants to study complex electronic structure of molecules. In addition to her single-investigator research, she has collaborated with other computational and experimental chemistry groups in the National Science Foundation’s Center for Sustainable Polymers to design efficient materials and catalysts for the production of polymers. She has published a career-total of 59 papers in peer-reviewed journals and in 2020 received the President’s Outstanding Research Award for Early Career Faculty at USD.
The American Chemical Society will present Vlaisavljevich with the award at its national meeting in San Diego in late March.
