UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Jonathan Kuo, assistant professor of chemistry, has been honored with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The CAREER award is NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty members who can serve as academic role models in research and education and lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
The five-year $700,000 CAREER award will support Kuo’s research on organic compounds called olefins, also known as alkenes. He will specifically study changes that occur when alkenes approach certain transition metals — especially palladium.
“The scale of alkene production is unfathomable. Somewhere between 4% and 8% of oil, for example, is refined and converted into some type of alkene,” Kuo said. “Subsequent reactions then convert these alkenes into plastics, medicines, and other chemicals. However, the alkene is normally nonreactive, so the first conceptual step for any alkene transformation is a chemical interaction that makes it less inert. One way to ‘activate’ the alkene is to bind it to a transition metal, which changes the alkene and makes it more reactive. The transition metal is therefore a catalyst, making it possible to convert olefins into other important molecules.”
As part of this research, Kuo will use various nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy techniques to evaluate the kinetics and thermodynamics of these alkene binding and rearrangement events. Kuo will also host a hands-on NMR workshop to showcase how the instrumentation can be used in this style of work. Several graduate student and postdocs will be involved in both the research and outreach activities.
“Some estimate that about 50% of consumer products feature something that can be traced back to an oil-derived alkene,” Kuo said. “By studying efficient catalytic reactions that upgrade alkenes, we fortify the most upstream portion of our chemical ecosystem. Building more interconnected or faster routes to a consumer product is critical to having a resilient economy and it ultimately reduces our dependence on crude oil.”
Kuo’s previous awards and honors include an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Grant from 2022 to 2024, a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2018 to 2021, the Arun Guthikonda Memorial Graduate Fellowship in 2017, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship from 2013 to 2016. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, ACS Catalysis, Organic Letters, Inorganic Chemistry and Organometallics.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Kuo was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania from 2017 to 2021. He earned a doctoral degree at Columbia University in 2017 and a bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012.