Three Penn Chemistry personnel have been promoted, effective July 1. Zahra Fakhraai has been promoted to Professor of Chemistry. Neil Tomson has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with Tenure. And Anthony Cirri has been promoted to Senior Lecturer.
Zahra received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in physics from the Sharif University of Technology in Iran. In 2003, she joined James Forrest’s group at the University of Waterloo and studied the dynamics of polymers in thin films and on their surfaces. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Waterloo in 2007, for which she received the American Physical Society’s Padden award. From 2007 to 2008, Zahra worked in Gilbert Walker’s group at the University of Toronto and studied the structure and chemical composition of block copolymers and protein aggregates using tip-enhanced near-field infrared imaging. Subsequently, she moved to Mark Ediger’s group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2009-2011) with an NSERC post-doctoral fellowship from the Canadian government. She joined Penn Chemistry in 2011, completing her transition from physicist to chemist. She is currently a Professor of Chemistry with secondary positions at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
Neil Tomson received a B.A. in Chemistry, with honors, in 2004 from Grinnell College, where he worked for Prof. T. Andrew Mobley on transition metal stannyl complexes, then a Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he investigated Group 5 imido chemistry under the joint supervision of Profs John Arnold and Robert G. Bergman. He held a post-doctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry (now Chemical Energy Conversion) under the direction of Prof. Dr. Karl Wieghardt that focused on the physical inorganic and computational investigation of redox-activity in 3d metal nitrosyl and nitrosoarene complexes. Neil then taught for a year at the College of St. Benedict | St. John’s University before moving to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked on uranium imido chemistry as a post-doctoral researcher in Prof. James M Boncella’s laboratory. He joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor in 2015. His awards include Glenn T. Seaborg and Director's Post-doctoral Fellowships at LANL, an NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) for Early-Stage Investigators, and an NSF CAREER Award.
Anthony Cirri received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Rowan University. After receiving his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Penn State University, he served as a postdoctoral scholar at both The Ohio State University and Stony Brook University. He joined the Penn Chemistry department as a full time lecturer in August of 2020. He was honored last year with the Deans Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty.