Catherine J. Murphy (born 1964) is an American chemist and materials scientist, and is the Larry Faulkner Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
[1] The first woman to serve as the head of the department of chemistry at UIUC,[2] Murphy is known for her work on nanomaterials, specifically the seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanorods of controlled aspect ratio.
[7] Murphy attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a first-generation college student.
[1] She held this professorship until 2017, when she received the Larry R. Faulkner Endowed Chair in Chemistry at UIUC.
In 2020, Murphy was appointed as the head of the department of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the first woman to ever hold this position.
[2] At UIUC, Murphy also holds affiliations with the departments of Bioengineering, Material Science and Engineering, the Materials Research Lab, the Micro and Nanotechnology Lab, the Center for Advanced Study, the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
[10] She edited two conference proceedings for SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics: the first in 2001 titled “Nanoparticles and Nanostructured Surfaces: Novel Reporters with Biological Applications,”[11] and the second in 2002 titled “Biomedical Nanotechnology Architectures and Applications”[12] Since 2008, Murphy has been a coauthor of the general chemistry textbook Chemistry: The Central Science.
Murphy is known for her work on the seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanorods of controlled aspect ratio.
[19] Murphy has won numerous awards and recognition for her scholarship, research, teaching, mentoring, and overall career.
[32] In 2011, Thomson Reuters ranked Murphy as number 10 in their Top 100 Materials Scientists of 2000–2010,[33] as number 32 in their Top 100 Chemists of 2000–2010,[34] a Highly Cited Researcher in Material Science in 2014 and 2015,[10] a Highly Cited Researcher in Chemistry in 2014, 2015, and 2016.