Gabriela Schlau-Cohen wins Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award

Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor Gabriela Schlau-Cohen has been named one of 14 young faculty nationwide to be honored with a 2020 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program supports the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences, and, when choosing its teacher-scholars, the foundation seeks those who demonstrate leadership in both research and education. As a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, Schlau-Cohen will receive an unrestricted research grant of $100,000. Since its inception in 1970, the Teacher-Scholar program has awarded over $45 million to support emerging young leaders in the chemical sciences.

Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University under Professor W.E. Moerner, Schlau-Cohen joined the MIT Department of Chemistry faculty as an assistant professor in 2015. She was recently promoted to associate professor without tenure, effective July 1.

Schlau-Cohen graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 2003, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical physics. She earned a PhD in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 2011. Schlau-Cohen’s honors include a Sloan Fellowship, a Beckman Young Investigator award, and the Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research.

Research in the Schlau-Cohen group is inherently multidisciplinary; the group combines tools from chemistry, optics, biology, and microscopy to develop new approaches to probe dynamics. They study dynamics in two classes of systems: biological and bio-inspired light-harvesting systems that are of interest to solar energy research and biomass production, and bacterial and mammalian receptor proteins that are targets for human therapeutics. To explore these systems, Schlau-Cohen and her group use ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy, single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy, and develop model membrane systems.

The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation is a leading nonprofit organization devoted to the advancement of the chemical sciences. It was established in 1946 by chemist, inventor, and businessman Camille Dreyfus in honor of his brother Henry. The foundation seeks to support the advancement of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances around the world.