Dr. Megan Sassin Honored by American Chemical Society
with Rising Star Award

Dr. Megan Sassin, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory, has been honored by the American Chemical Society (ACS) with a Rising Star Award. ACS's Women Chemists Committee has established the award to recognize exceptional mid-career women chemists across all areas of chemistry on a national level. This new award, created in 2012, is intended to help promote the retention of women in science.

Dr. Megan Sassin, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory, has been honored by the American Chemical society with a Rising Star Award.
(Photo: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)

Dr. Sassin's research interests are presently centered on the design, fabrication, and characterization of multifunctional 3D electrode architectures for energy-storage applications, such as electrochemical capacitors, aqueous rechargeable batteries, and all-solid-state 3D batteries.

Dr. Sassin received her bachelor's degree in chemistry from Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, in 2001 and subsequently earned her master's (2003) and doctorate (2007) degrees in chemistry from the University of California, Irvine under the direction of Professor Reginald M. Penner. Her graduate studies focused on using electrodeposition to fabricate nanowire-based thermocouples, which demonstrate sensor response times on the order of microseconds. While at UCI, she also founded the Calcium chapter of Iota Sigma Pi and served as the president from 2005 to 2007.

In 2008, Dr. Sassin joined the Advanced Electrochemical Materials Section at NRL in Washington, D.C. as an NRC postdoctoral fellow, working with staff scientist Dr. Jeffrey W. Long to design, synthesize and characterize nanostructured electrode architectures that are used to enhance the performance of aqueous asymmetric electrochemical capacitors.

She joined the Advanced Electrochemical Materials section as a staff scientist in 2010, under the direction of Dr. Debra Rolison, and was subsequently awarded the Jerome and Isabella Karle Fellowship to investigate three-dimensional architectures for electrostatic capacitors. She is a co-recipient of the 2009 Arthur K. Doolittle Award from the Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering Division of the ACS, and is the author of several high-profile papers, including two invited review articles on the topic of electrochemical capacitors.

Dr. Sassin and the other 2012 Rising Star Award winners were recognized during the recent national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

About the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

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