Renske van der Veen, a professor of chemistry at Illinois, was awarded a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a five-year, $875,000 grant.
She was one of 18 fellows announced Oct. 15 by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fellowship.
Van der Veen performs research aimed at visualizing light-induced processes in materials with resolutions down to the single-atom level. Researchers in her laboratory develop new microscopy and spectroscopy tools to directly track structural changes in single nanoparticles while they convert light into useful chemical energy, such as electricity or fuels.