Banerjee ACS Award
Banerjee Recognized by American Chemical Society
Named a 2026 Rising Star in Materials Science
Progna Banerjee, PhD, a tenure-track assistant professor of inorganic chemistry in Loyola University Chicago’s College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a “2026 Rising Star in Materials Science” by the American Chemical Society (ACS).
The highly competitive international honor recognizes emerging global leaders in the field and includes an invitation from the editors of ACS Materials Au to contribute a featured article to its 2026 Rising Stars collection.
“Recognition from the American Chemical Society places Dr. Banerjee among an elite group of emerging leaders in her field,” said Peter J. Schraeder, PhD, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Her work underscores the College’s reputation for impactful research that contributes to solving real-world problems.”
Dr. Banerjee was selected for her independent lab’s pioneering work on metastable ion transport and nanocrystal routes to fast-ion conductors. This research could help accelerate the development of safer, more efficient solid-state batteries built from earth abundant elements.
In her invited Perspective, Dr. Banerjee shows how tiny semiconductor particles known as “quantum dots” can be chemically guided to stitch together into solid materials that allow lithium ions to move quickly. By carefully controlling surface chemistry and the way particles attach, her team creates specific structural percolative pathways that function like express lanes for ions, improving how efficiently they travel through the material.
Solid electrolytes often underperform because ions become trapped at the boundaries where microscopic grains meet. Dr. Banerjee’s research connects the chemistry at the material’s surface to how those grains fuse together, what kinds of defects form, and how well the material ultimately conducts ions across different temperatures and pressures. Her Perspective organizes these insights into clear, testable design rules that other laboratories can adopt.
Among the key takeaways:
- Surface-directed assembly of nanocrystals synthesized with metastable structures leads to predictable defect networks and higher ionic conductivity.
- The “order of operations or process history” in processing can determine whether ion pathways successfully form.
- A standardized measurement workflow improves comparability across research labs.
The recognition comes less than two years after Dr. Banerjee launched her independent research program at Loyola. Much of the work was made possible by a home-built, multi-channel impedance platform designed and constructed with students in her lab.
Dr. Banerjee also collaborates with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and partner institutions nationwide. As principal investigator and corresponding author, she has led multiple high-impact publications and preprints in top-tier journals, with invited talks scheduled at national scientific meetings throughout this year.
This latest honor highlights both the rapid rise of Dr. Banerjee’s lab and the broader impact of Loyola scholarship advancing sustainable energy technologies.
About the College of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1870, the College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest and largest of Loyola University Chicago’s 13 schools and colleges, serving as the academic home for nearly 8,000 students (roughly 50 percent of Loyola’s total student population). It is academically diverse with twenty academic departments that span an array of intellectual pursuits, ranging from the natural sciences and computational sciences to the humanities, the social sciences, and the fine and performing arts. It is also highly interdisciplinary with thirty-one interdisciplinary programs and seven interdisciplinary centers, including the mission-centric Jesuit Heritage Research Center and the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. The College is home to over 450 full-time, award-winning faculty, who are committed to teaching and research excellence. They teach nearly 2,000 classes each semester, including 88 percent of all Core Curriculum classes taken by undergraduate students across the university. They also contribute to eleven doctoral programs whose graduates have helped propel Loyola starting in 2025 to R-1 research status (the highest research status a university can achieve). Our students and faculty are engaged internationally at our John Felice Rome Center in Italy, as well as at dozens of university-sponsored study abroad and research sites around the world. Home to the departments that anchor the university’s Core Curriculum, the College seeks to prepare all of Loyola’s students to think critically, to engage the world of the 21st century at ever-deepening levels, and to become caring and compassionate individuals. Our faculty, staff, and students view service to others not just as one option among many, but as a constitutive dimension of their very being. In the truest sense of the Jesuit ideal, our graduates strive to be “individuals for others.”