Kenneth L. Knappenberger Jr. Named Recipient of the 2016 Coblentz Award

The Coblentz Society has named Kenneth L. Knappenberger Jr. as the recipient of the 2016 Coblentz Award.

Knappenberger Jr. is an associate professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. His research group has advanced the characterization of electron- and energy-transfer processes in nanoscale systems and the understanding of processes in nanoscale media through the design and use of new optical spectroscopic techniques.

Experimental approaches include both time-resolved and single-molecule methods. The resulting chemical information can be used to study important issues in nanoscale chemistry and physics and single-molecule analytical detection and the designing of new nanoscale chemistries. Other areas of study include energy transfer involving coupled nanocrystals, metal-enhanced light harvesting, and the development of new experimental techniques. The results from these studies both add to the knowledge of chemical nanomaterials and their associated physics and help advance the state-of-the-art of already existing spectroscopic fields such as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and metal-enhanced fluorescence. Much of the development work in this research focuses on single-molecule chemical systems.

Knappenberger Jr. received his B.S. degree in chemistry from Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania (Lock Haven, Pennsylvania) in 2000. He received his PhD in physical chemistry from Pennsylvania State University (State College, Pennsylvania) under the direction of A.W. Castleman Jr.

He has received numerous awards, including the Developing Scholar Award from Florida State University, the Joseph Wang Award in Nanoscience, the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and the Young Investigator Award from the Inter-American Photochemical Society.

The Coblentz Award is presented annually to an outstanding young molecular spectroscopist under the age of 40. This award is the society’s original award (first awarded in 1964), and is the complement of the Craver Award, which recognizes young spectroscopists for efforts in applied analytical vibrational spectroscopy.