Gwendolyn A. Bailey

Prof. Gwen Bailey an Honors B.Sc. in chemistry from the University of British Columbia (2012), where her research on metal-based radiopharmaceuticals with Professor Chris Orvig was recognized with the Lefevre Medal & Prize in Honors Chemistry. There, she also complemented her academic training through industrial research at Arbutus Biopharma (Burnaby, BC) and Xerox Research Center Canada, developing lipid-based siRNA delivery vesicles and organic electronics. From there, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa with Professor Deryn Fogg as an NSERC CGS-D fellow, uncovering previously unrecognized decomposition pathways in commercial second-generation olefin metathesis catalysts for olefin metathesis to establish key design rules for improved catalytic performance. Her thesis won major national accolades, including the ACS Young Investigator Award, the Royal Society of Canada Alice Wilson Award, the Governor General of Canada Gold Medal, and the Award for Graduate Work in Inorganic Chemistry from the Canadian Society of Chemistry. In 2018, she was awarded a Resnick Sustainability Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship and NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue research at Caltech with Professor Theodor Agapie, where she investigated rare open-shell molybdenum carbide and carbyne complexes for C–C coupling methodologies and biomimetic cluster synthesis for N2 fixation. 

Gwen started her independent research career at the University of Minnesota Department of Chemistry in 2021, where she directs a research group leveraging atomically precise nanochemistry to develop Earth-abundant catalysts for energy conversion and storage. Recognized with the 2023 ACS PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award and the 2026 Beckman Young Investigator Award, her research has garnered over 50 invitations to lecture at Universities across Canada and the U.S. and elite national and at international conferences such as the Gordon Research Conferences, ACS National Meetings, and the Asian Conference on Bioinorganic Chemistry in Jaipur, India. 

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