Michael Zdilla, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, received the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, which supports the careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences. Administered by the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the award provides an unrestricted research grant of $75,000.

"I'm reeling a bit from the surprise of winning," says Zdilla. "We put together a very strong case, but many of the winners are from top-ten institutions. Dreyfus is a special foundation that supports young scientists, looking at both their research and their commitment to teaching."

While the Dreyfus recognition was awarded specifically for Zdilla's work in "Synthesis and Reactivity of Multimetal Systems Inspired by Biology," his research is wide-ranging. "We are doing high-impact and very diverse research," says Zdilla, who notes collaborations with roughly half of the Chemistry Department's faculty members. "All the sub-disciplines are represented here and we are good at chemical synthesis, so that's a great environment for working collaboratively."

On the teaching side, Zdilla was cited for his work promoting crystallography, the study of atomic and molecular structure. Crystallography techniques are used to examine how atoms are arranged in order to understand the relationship between a particular material's atomic structure and its properties.

"Crystallography has been important to biology, geology, physics and chemical sciences for a long time, but only relatively recently has single-crystal X-ray diffraction become broadly accessible to students due to rapid improvements in computing power," says Zdilla, who has developed a crystallography course here at Temple—one of just a few offered nationwide—and is currently building an online crystallography resources database. 

"Not long ago solving a crystal structure was a PhD thesis, now my undergrads are doing it," says Zdilla. "It's gone from a major endeavor to a standard technology. That is very exciting."