Timothy J. O'Leary, S.J., Lecture, "Developing Alternatives to Oil as Feedstocks for our Chemicals and Liquid Fuels"

About This Event

Karen Goldberg, Ph.D., is the 39th Annual Timothy J. O'Leary, S.J., Distinguished Scientist. The public lecture entitled "Developing Alternatives to Oil as Feedstocks for our Chemicals and Liquid Fuels" will be held in Wolff Auditorium, Jepson Center, on Thursday, February 19 at 7:30 p.m.  

Dr. Goldberg is the Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Chemistry, and the inaugural Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). She earned her A.B. in chemistry from Barnard College and her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral study at The Ohio State University, Goldberg joined the faculty at Illinois State University, a primarily undergraduate institution, and then in 1995, moved to the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. From 2007-2017, she served as Director of the first NSF Phase II Center for Chemical Innovation, the Center for Enabling New Technologies through Catalysis (CENTC). In 2017, she moved to her current position at Penn.

Goldberg is best known for her work developing mechanistic understanding of fundamental organometallic reactions and for application of that knowledge to the creation and optimization of new catalytic systems. Goldberg is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and of the American Chemical Society (ACS). She received the ACS Award for Organometallic Chemistry in 2016 and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. More than 85 graduate students and postdoctoral research associates and over 75 undergraduate students have trained in her laboratories.