Amymarie Bartholomew, whose research focuses on using inorganic synthesis to control the properties of new stimuli-responsive materials, has been appointed assistant professor of chemistry, effective Jan. 1.
Bartholomew is currently an Arnold O. Beckman postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University.
At Yale, Bartholomew intends to start a laboratory that uses synthetic inorganic chemistry to discover methods to control the properties of physical materials. Her research will focus on developing new stimuli-responsive materials for applications ranging from controlling electrical and thermal transport in ultrathin and transparent devices to transforming solar energy directly into mechanical work. The materials her group is targeting will respond to changes in temperature, pressure, light, or the presence of small molecules and therefore are expected to serve as sensors or as controllable switches to transform these stimuli into desired outputs. For instance, she will investigate materials that undergo a mechanical change in response to visible and solar light, allowing the harnessing of solar energy in new ways.
“The Department of Chemistry is excited to have Dr. Bartholomew as a faculty member,” said Prof. Nilay Hazari. “Building on our historical strength in synthetic chemistry, Dr. Bartholomew will move the department in a new direction with her focus on developing new materials with specific properties. Her outstanding performance as a graduate student and postdoc highlight her research skills, and we expect that our undergraduate and graduate students will gravitate towards this new area of inorganic chemistry.”
Bartholomew obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2019, where she worked on the synthesis, multielectron reactivity, and electronic structure of trinuclear transition metal clusters in the laboratory of Prof. Theodore Betley in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department. In 2019, she began an Arnold O. Beckman postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Xavier Roy at Columbia University, where she synthesizes tailor-made inorganic materials to enable tomorrow’s electronic and energy technologies.
“I was drawn to the Yale Chemistry Department because the inorganic division at Yale is very strong and cohesive, and as a junior faculty member in inorganic chemistry, that’s something that’s really important to me,” said Bartholomew. “The excitement for each other’s work is a really pervasive feeling in the Chemistry Department at Yale and a place where I think that my enthusiasm will be well-matched and will fit in. And that’s just a great environment to be a young scientist.”
Bartholomew, who earned her B.S. in chemistry from Yale University in 2013, is thrilled to be back where she first started doing chemistry research and “learned to love being in the lab.”