David Waldeck, a professor in Pitt’s Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, earned a $7.5 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The award will fund a five-year project.
MURI funds teams from across universities investigating high priority topics and opportunities that intersect more than one traditional technical discipline. Waldeck will lead researchers from seven universities, including Pitt, Duke University and the University of Southern California, to develop the understanding of the interaction between electron spin and chiral matter.
In 1999, Waldeck — along with Ron Naaman and others at the Weizmann Institute of Science — first reported a strong spin-filtering of electrons by chiral molecules, called Chiral Induced Spin Selectivity (CISS). The MURI researchers aim to develop a fundamental quantum mechanical description for CISS and to explore and demonstrate its use for communicating spin information over long distances, its application for affecting chemical reactions and its manifestations in redox biology.