National Science Foundation awards second grant to Hudnall

By Ryan Thornton
Office of Media Relations
January 15, 2016

Todd Hudnall, assistant professor of chemistry at Texas State University, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant for future research with organic radicals.

The five-year Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant was awarded through the NSF Division of Chemistry. Hudnall currently is operating under a three-year NSF Individual Investigator Program grant, awarded in 2014, for research into carbenes.

“It is rare for a principle investigator (PI) to receive two active research grants from the NSF, and nearly unprecedented for a PI to have an active CAREER grant with an active Individual Investigator or core program grant,” Hudnall explained. “Moreover, this CAREER proposal was funded through the same NSF program as my other grant, which is also very unusual.”

The $420,000 grant will fund Hudnall’s research project, titled “CAREER: Correlating Organic Radical Structure to Electrochemical and Photophysical Properties: Evolving Energy Storage and Light-Emitting Materials.”

“The goals of the project are to develop a correlation between the structure of novel organic radicals to properties such as electrochemical storage and light-emission,” said Hudnall. This is an expansion of Hudnall’s recent work looking for ways to store energy at the molecular level. “Ultimately, we hope that these radicals may find application as next-generation batteries or in organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs).”