Beard

CHOISE Scientific Collaboration Awarded the 2026 Royal Society of Chemistry Faraday Horizon Prize

Daniel Morton — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:41:23 +0000

CHOISE Scientific Collaboration Awarded the 2026 Royal Society of Chemistry Faraday Horizon Prize Daniel Morton Tue, 06/23/2026 - 18:41

Daniel Morton

The Center for Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE) has been awarded the 2026 Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Faraday Horizon Prize, in recognition of its creation of a new class of chiral semiconductors that unify the control of spin, charge, and light within a single electronically active material platform.

CHOISE is a Department of Energy-funded Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) bringing together 17 research groups from nine institutions: the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), Duke University, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, San Diego State University, the University of Toledo, the University of Utah, and the University of California Santa Cruz. The Center includes seven RASEI Fellows, and is led by Fellow Matt Beard of NLR.

RASEI Fellows Kirstin Alberi (NLR), Steve Barlow (CU Boulder), Joseph Berry (NLR), Jeff Blackburn (NLR), Joseph Luther (NLR), and Seth Marder (CU Boulder) are all part of the collaboration.

The RSC Faraday Horizon Prize is awarded annually in recognition of significant recent discoveries and advances in physical chemistry. In selecting CHOISE, the prize committee highlighted both the scientific excellence and the collaborative character of the work, recognizing how the team has come together across disciplines and institutions to develop innovative ideas.

At the heart of CHOISE's prize-winning research is chirality, the property by which molecules exist in distinct left- and right-handed forms. By embedding chirality directly into a semiconductor, the team has demonstrated that molecular handedness can govern the behavior of charge carriers and their spin. This establishes a fundamentally new paradigm for spin-dependent optoelectronics: technologies that use both light and electrical signals to process and transmit information.

Optoelectronic devices already underpin much of modern life, from the fiber-optic networks that carry global internet traffic, to the sensors in medical imaging, and the LEDs and lasers in everyday electronics. However, the next generation of technologies, including applications such as quantum computing, ultra-secure communications, and energy-efficient data processing, will demand far greater control over the quantum properties of electrons, particularly their spin. Conventional semiconductors offer limited means to achieve this. This is where this work comes in. CHOISE's chiral semiconductor platform opens a new route to that control, using the inherent geometry of molecules rather than complex external hardware to influence the properties of the signal. This could ultimately lead to devices that are not only more powerful, but significantly more energy-efficient.

JUNE 2026

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Spin-Polarized Oxygen Evolution Reaction Enabled by Chiral Molecules Coupled with Ferromagnetic Electrocatalysts

Daniel Morton — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:31:56 +0000

Spin-Polarized Oxygen Evolution Reaction Enabled by Chiral Molecules Coupled with Ferromagnetic Electrocatalysts Daniel Morton Thu, 12/11/2025 - 17:31

ACS APPLIED MATERIALS & INTERFACES, 2025, 17, 51, 69389-69397

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Six RASEI Fellows featured among the 2025 Clarivate highly cited researchers

Daniel Morton — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 16:09:48 +0000

Six RASEI Fellows featured among the 2025 Clarivate highly cited researchers Daniel Morton Thu, 11/20/2025 - 09:09

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RIO Highlight

NLR Highlight

Six RASEI Fellows highlighted as Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers in their 2025 list. Congratulations to Matt Beard, Joe Berry, Joey Luther, Mike McGehee, Mike Toney, and Merritt Turetsky!

Each year Clarivate, the parent company of Web of Science, performs an evaluation and selection process to identify and recognize researchers whose exceptional and community-wide contributions shape the future of science, technology, and academia globally. The evaluation is an evolving process, which employs criteria to address issues including hyper-prolific authorship, excessive self-citation, anomalous publication and citation patterns and profiles, in an attempt to ensure that recognized researchers meet the benchmarks they have developed.

This provides a mechanism to provide a snapshot of the global research landscape of current top-tier research talent, providing insights on global research and innovation trends.

Daniel Morton — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 02:09:36 +0000

2024 Nozik Lecture | Matt Beard Daniel Morton Fri, 12/20/2024 - 19:09

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Watch the Lecture

Matt Beard

The Arthur Nozik Lecture Series honors the research and career of Prof. Nozik, who has been a leader in the thriving ecosystem of renewable energy research that has developed along the front range over the last four decades. This lecture was recorded on December 9, 2024.

Biography:

Matthew C. Beard is a senior laboratory research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Director of the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE) and Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) funded by the Office of Science within DOE. Beard is also a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute a joint research institute between NREL and CU Boulder and an Adjoint professor within the Chemistry department of Colorado School of Mines. Beard has been at NREL since 2003 (working for Arthur Nozik) and before that graduated from the Yale Chemistry Department where he received his Ph.D. degree developing non-contact ultrafast probes of carrier dynamics in semiconductors and semiconductor nanocrystals with Charlie Schmuttenmaer. Beard also served as Associate director for the Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics. Beard is a fellow of the AAAS, American Physical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Beard is listed a Clarivate highly cited researcher from 2023-2018 with over 200 publications. Beard was awarded the 2020 H.M. Hubbard award, the 2022 E.O. Lawarence Award from DOE, the RSC Chemical Dynamics award, and NREL’s highest impact paper in 2024. Beard serves on the editorial boards of Phyiscal Review Letters (divisional editor), ACS Energy Letters and Journal of Chemical Physics. He has 10 patents and patent applications under review and given > 150 invited presentations, including being named the 2024 Alexander Cruickshank Gordon research conference lecturer, the 2022 McElvain lecturer at U. of Wisconsin, and the 2024 William Chupka Lecturer at Yale University.

Control over Spin, Charge, and Light

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