2026 AVS
Prairie Chapter
Symposium

Prof. King received her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Chemistry in 2015 as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow under the direction of Prof. Daniel Neumark. She continued her scientific training as an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral fellow at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany from 2015–2018 working with Prof. Julia Stähler. Since 2018 Prof. King has been an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago.

Prof. King’s research focuses on using interfaces to modify light matter/coupling and charge and energy transport in molecular and material systems. Prof. King has won numerous awards including a DOE Early Career Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a 2020 Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award, and was named a 2025 Sloan Research Fellow.

Christos G. Takoudis is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He also holds affiliate faculty appointments in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Restorative Dentistry. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1982. Following his doctoral studies, he joined the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University, where he served on the faculty from 1981 to 1996 before moving to UIC.

Professor Takoudis and his research group have pioneered the chemistry and engineering of inherently selective atomic layer deposition (ALD), originally termed selective epitaxial growth. His group has made significant contributions to the integration of artificial intelligence into ALD processes, enabled the synthesis of novel materials through ALD, and advanced room-temperature ALD for biomaterials functionalization. In collaboration with Michael Weaver, he also explicitly demonstrated in situ real-time observation of catalytic intermediates under industrially relevant conditions using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, while simultaneously monitoring reaction products by mass spectrometry.

Fahad Mahmood is an Associate Professor and Compton Faculty Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. His research explores collective electronic phenomena and nonequilibrium states in quantum materials.

His group combines ultrafast optical and terahertz spectroscopy with photoemission and other momentum-resolved probes. These methods reveal how light can expose, manipulate, and create correlated phases on their intrinsic time scales, offering routes to dynamically control quantum materials.

Dayne Swearer is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University. He earned his Ph.D. from Rice University in 2019, completed postdoctoral research at Stanford University, and joined Northwestern in 2022. His research group studies nonequilibrium chemical processes driven by electromagnetic fields, with particular emphasis on plasmonic nanomaterials and nonthermal plasmas. By integrating materials synthesis, spectroscopy, microscopy, and chemical reaction engineering, the group develops new approaches to the electrification of chemical production and sensing.

Thomas F. Kelly, PhD, is Founder, President, and CEO of Steam Instruments, Inc. He was previously a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and founded Imago Scientific Instruments (now part of CAMECA) to commercialize his invention, the Local Electrode Atom Probe (LEAP). LEAP is now a widely used atomic-scale tomographic instrument with nearly $1B of instruments sold. Dr. Thomas F. Kelly has been active in the fields of analytical electron microscopy, atom probe microscopy, and structural and semiconducting materials since 1977. He co-authored a book on LEAP technology in 2012 and a foundational book on Atomic-Scale Analytical Tomography in 2022. His work has been recognized by the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award from MRS, the prestigious Nelson W. Taylor Lecture at Pennsylvania State University, the MAS Peter Duncumb Award, and Fellowship in MSA, MAS, IFES and KSM. He has won three R&D 100 Awards. He was elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2021. In 2026, Tom received an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) from the Université de Rouen.

Dr. Kelly earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering with Highest Honors from Northeastern University in 1977 and a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 where he studied rapidly solidified stainless steels using analytical electron microscopy. He was a tenured professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1983 to 2002. In 1999 he founded Imago Scientific Instruments where he created the Local Electrode Atom Probe that has become the commercial atomic-scale tomographic instrument in worldwide use today. Imago was acquired by CAMECA Instruments in 2010. In 2018, he founded Steam Instruments and is currently President and CEO.