Anne Bentley Receives Rising Star Award

Associate Professor and Department Chair of Chemistry Anne Bentley has received the 2020 Rising Star Award from the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Women Chemists Committee (WCC).  The Rising Star Award recognizes up to ten outstanding women mid-career scientists who have demonstrated outstanding promise for contributions to their fields. The award will cover travel expenses to a symposium highlighting the winners’ work at the Spring 2020 National ACS Meeting.

While nanoparticles are now used in a variety of consumer products, very little is known about their environmental impact.  Dr. Bentley’s research seeks to understand the chemical fates of these nanoparticles under everyday environmental conditions, using silver and gold nanoparticles as models.  Since 2008 Dr. Bentley has mentored 25 undergraduates in her laboratory. She and her students have presented their work at nearly every spring national ACS meeting, and several research projects have become teaching labs for L&C chemistry courses. 

Dr. Bentley has been very active in the pedagogical community and serves on the leadership council of the Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC), which maintains the VIPEr (Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource) website. This work has national reach, and she was also selected as a VIPEr Fellow in 2019.  Her articles on pedagogy are products of collaborative efforts funded by sizable external grants, including a five-year NSF IUSE (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education) program grant on which she is a co-PI.  Dr. Bentley is the coauthor of a textbook for non-chemistry majors, Chemistry in Context, which further extends the reach of her teaching; L&C’s chemistry department uses it in Perspectives in Environmental Chemistry, a GE course for non-science majors.

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 150,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

The Women Chemists Committee (WCC) serves the membership of the American Chemical Society with its mission to be leaders in attracting, retaining, developing, promoting, and advocating for women in the chemical sciences. The Rising Star award was established in 2011 to help promote retention of women in science.