Buriak wins Rio Tinto Alcan Award

Jillian Buriak was born in Toronto, and received an AB from Harvard University in 1990, and a PhD from the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France in 1995. After an NSERC postdoctoral appointment at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, Buriak started her academic career at Purdue University in 1997, being promoted to associate professor, with tenure, in 2001. In 2003 she joined the University of Alberta and the National Institute for Nanotechnology as a full professor. She presently holds the AITF Industrial Chair on Solar Energy and Solar Fuels, and the Canada Research Chair of Nanomaterials for Energy. She was on the Board of Reviewing Editors (BoRE) at Science from 2003 to 2008, was an associate editor at Nano from 2009 to 2013, and in 2014, became the editor-in-chief of Chemistry of Materials where she handles ~5,500 manuscripts per year. Awards include the Arthur Doolittle Award from the PMSE division of the American Chemical Society, the Burghausen Award, a Killam Annual Professorship, and Fellowship in the AAAS, and the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC, UK). Buriak’s interests range from materials for energy applications (solar, water splitting), self-assembly on technologically relevant semiconductor surfaces, and mechanistic surface chemistry and functionalization on surfaces such as silicon and other semiconductors.