Thomas E. Mallouk

Thomas E. Mallouk received his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Brown University, where he did undergraduate research with Aaron Wold. He worked in industry for two years and was a Ph.D. student from 1979-1983 with Neil Bartlett at the University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral work with Mark Wrighton at MIT (1983-85) he held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-93) and at Penn State University (1993-2019). He is currently Vagelos Professor in Energy Research in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the synthesis of inorganic materials and their application to solar and electrochemical energy conversion, nano- and micro-robotics, surface chemistry and electrocatalysis, low dimensional physical phenomena, and environmental remediation. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mallouk and his students developed layer-by-layer techniques for assembling inorganic materials, and topochemical reactions for interconverting inorganic materials in the solid state. That work led to studies of artificial photosynthesis in microporous and lamellar materials, resulting in the first molecule-based non-sacrificial systems for hydrogen evolution with visible light in 1991, and for overall water splitting in 2009. Mallouk and his students developed high throughput methods for electrocatalyst discovery, as well as bipolar membranes, and have studied them for efficient electrochemical energy conversion in electrolyzers, fuel cells, flow batteries, and lithium ion batteries. In 2004, Mallouk and his colleague Ayusman Sen created the first chemically powered microswimmers and micropumps, initiating a very active field of research on artificial swimmers as microrobots and active matter. Mallouk is the author of 450 publications, including a few good ones, and has a Web of Science h-index of 115. He is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

2019	-	Present	Vagelos Professor in Energy Research, University of Pennsylvania
2016	-	2019	Evan Pugh University Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Physics, and Engineering Science and Mechanics, The Pennsylvania State University
2016	-	2018	Head, Department of Chemistry, Pennsylvania State University
2013	-	2017	Evan Pugh University Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Physics, Pennsylvania State University
2010	-	2013	Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Physics, Pennsylvania State University
1998	-	2010	DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics, Pennsylvania State University
1993	-	1998	Professor of Chemistry, Pennsylvania State University
1991	-	1993	Professor of Chemistry, The University of Texas at Austin
1989	-	1991	Associate Professor of Chemistry, The University of Texas at Austin
1985	-	1989	Assistant Professor of Chemistry, The University of Texas at Austin

Educational & Research History

Research History

Selected Papers