May 16, 2008

At the 2008 commencement ceremony for Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Dean Timothy Barbari awarded the 2008 Harold N. Glassman Dissertation Award in the Sciences to Jingsong Huang (Ph.D. ’06, Kertesz).  According to the Graduate School, the Glassman Award is “given for truly distinguished scholarship only and should be seen as significant honors.”

When announcing Dr. Huang’s award, Dean Barbari made the following comments:

Dr. Jingsong Huang is the 2008 recipient of the Harold N. Glassman Dissertation Award in the Sciences for his dissertation, “Multicenter Covalent Pi-Pi Bonding Interaction and its Role in the Solid-State Properties of Phenalenyl-based Organic Radical Materials.”

The development and creation of new materials with unusual properties is at the forefront of much research in the chemical and physical sciences world wide. A team led by Dr. Robert C. Haddon recently discovered new phenalenyl-based organic radical materials. Dr. Huang’s dissertation examined magnetism, structure, electrical conductivity, and other electronic properties of those materials by applying modern computational chemistry tools drawing on a combination of molecular and solid state orbital theory and the Hubbard dimer model. His mentor, Dr. Miklos Kertesz, stated that Dr. Huang’s research provided crucial insight into the function and optimization of the new organic compounds and their insulating counterparts aiding the design of better new materials. Dr. Huang extended these studies into an important category of molecular transformations known as Cope rearrangement. This discovery represented a new class of reactions, and Dr. Huang was invited to present his results at the National Meetings of the American Chemical Society.

Dr. Huang has made fundamental contributions to material chemistry that will assist leading experimental and theoretical materials chemists in expanding their research. He already has nine publications, four of which appear in The Journal of the American Chemical Society, the premier and highly-selective American chemistry journal. For his many achievements and essential contributions, the Graduate School proudly awards Dr. Jingsong Huang the Glassman dissertation award in the sciences.