Dr Chapman’s work impacts broad materials and applications including energy storage in batteries, porous materials for gas capture, storage and catalysis, and nanomaterials to remediate nuclear waste. She both designs high fidelity tools to explore materials’ function and applies these to solve important questions for key systems. More broadly, her efforts have transformed niche X-ray analyses attempted by a handful of experts into robust, broadly useful tools capable of addressing complex problems in chemistry and material science.

While probing material function under real operating conditions in real time is widely valued, doing so without changing the function—a “Schrödinger's cat” problem—is a challenge that Dr Chapman has recognized and addressed, thereby resolving misleading, inconsistent results in the literature.

As co-director of a new energy research center at Stony Brook, Dr Chapman’s ongoing innovations aim to revolutionize how we interrogate, understand and control reactions leading to the discovery of new materials and materials’ states.