PI: Progna Banerjee, Ph.D.
 Email: pbanerjee@luc.edu Office: Flanner Hall 404 Loyola University Chicago 1068 W Sheridan Rd, Chicago, IL 60660 | SCIENTIFIC & TECHNICAL EXPERTISE Progna is an experimentalist with over a decade of experience in colloidal wet-chemical syntheses of atomically precise inorganic nanoclusters and nanocrystals. She demonstrated the feasibility and mechanistic principles of atomic-scale chemical transformations in these materials to tunable compositions, morphologies, redox states of constituent elements using post-synthetic “cation/anion” exchange techniques. She is an expert on a variety of characterization techniques including x-ray diffraction (table-top and synchrotron-based 2D), electron microscopy (TEM, STEM, EDS mapping, EELS, in-situ liquid-cell imaging), Raman, optical suite (absorption, photoluminescence, lifetimes, mapping, FTIR), Differential scanning calorimetry and electrochemical techniques. Her computational background consists of using Python and C-based software development for TEM and XRD analyses, and COMSOL and nanoDDSCAT based simulations on plasmonic studies during her training. |
| Progna is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Chemistry & Biochemistry department at Loyola University Chicago, starting in August of 2024. She joined from the The Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, USA, where she was a NST core-funded postdoctoral appointee (2021-2024). Prior to that she was a NSF MRSEC postdoc fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, USA (2020-2021) investigating light-matter interactions in bioinspired nanostructures for a DoD-funded MURI project; and an EBI-Shell ALS affiliated postdoc fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, USA (2019-2020) in battery science. She earned her Ph.D. (Physics with Materials Chemistry) and M.S. (Strongly Correlated Condensed Matter) degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA in Dec. 2018 & 2014, respectively. Before that, she completed M.Tech. (Solid State Technology) and M.Sc. (Physics) degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. | FELLOWSHIPS, HONORS AND AWARDS Post-Ph.D 2022 American Chemical Society-CAS Future Leader (1/30 awardees selected globally and from a wide array of scientific disciplines) 2021-present Centre Postdoc Appointee, 1 of 8 postdocs selected at Centre for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory 2021 American Chemical Society P2F (Postdoc to Faculty) Future Faculty Scholar 2020-21 Postdoctoral Fellow, MRSEC, UT Austin 2019-20 EBI-Shell ALS affiliated Postdoctoral Fellow, Berkeley Laboratory During Ph.D 2018 Scott Anderson Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award, Physics Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2017 University fellowship including travel grant, Graduate College, UIUC 2017 64th AVS Prairie Chapter Symposium Registration Waiver 2017 First prize for poster presentation, Monsanto Symposium, Urbana, IL 2016 Academic Leadership for Women in Engineering, SWE-ALWE Program 2016 ASSIST Travel Grant, SWE Annual National Conference, USA M.Tech, M.Sc & B.Sc 2010-12 Govt. of India MRHM Institute Fellowship, received at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 2011 S.I.P.I.S. Summer Fellowship (10 awards granted annually), NUS, Singapore 2010 Indian Academy of Sciences Summer Research Fellowship 2009 Summer Fellowship, S. N. Bose Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata 2010 Top 1 percentile, rank 43 in GATE Entrance (out of 8000+ applicants), all-India level 2008 Top 1 percentile among JAM applicants (Joint Admission to M.Sc) at all-India level 2005–08 First Rank in Department, highest GPA among all STEM field students in College 2008 Hiron Bala Memorial Gold Medal (Highest GPA in the College), University |
Banerjee Battery Research 