Catherine J. Murphy, Ph.D.

Larry R. Faulkner Endowed Chair in Chemistry, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Catherine J. Murphy, the Larry R. Faulkner Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a 1996 Cottrell Scholar, has pioneered the colloidal synthesis of shape-controlled gold and silver nanoparticles in aqueous solution. In the 5-100 nm size range, gold and silver exhibit brilliant shape-dependent optical properties that enable applications in chemical sensing, biological imaging, optical displays, enhanced energy conversion devices, mechanically improved polymer nanocomposites and photothermal therapy for thermal ablation of pathogenic cells. The spread of gold to so many technology sectors is in part due to Murphy’s work. Since 2001, her lab developed the seed-mediated growth method to synthesize these nanomaterials and has extensively studied their formation mechanisms, kinetics, and surface chemistry. The seed-mediated growth approach is now widely adopted by the nanomaterials community as a way to control crystal growth on the nanoscale. Murphy’s team was among the first to popularize the notion of preferential adsorption of structure-directing agents to emerging crystal faces as a chemical mechanism for the anisotropic growth of nanomaterials. Murphy’s team has demonstrated the first usage of these nanomaterials as “nano strain gauges” to optically measure deformation of soft matrices (2005, 2007), photothermal destruction of pathogenic bacteria (2008), the ability of nanomaterials to alter cell phenotype and behavior (2008-) and the influence of surface chemistry on cellular response (2014-), quantitative understanding of the mechanism of their apparent cytotoxicity (2009) and its mitigation (2009, 2010), the first result for engineered nanomaterial exposure to a whole ecosystem (2009), and that photothermal heating of plasmonic nanoparticles quantitatively alters their surface chemistry (2012-).

Murphy earned B.S. degrees in chemistry and biochemistry from UIUC in 1986, her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1990, and from 1990-1993 was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. She was named a Cottrell Scholar in 1996 while on the faculty of the University of South Carolina. Murphy’s other honors include the 2020 ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry, the 2019 Remsen Award, the 2019 Linus Pauling Medal, the 2019 MRS Medal, and many others. In 2015 she was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and in 2019 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.