Prof. Joe Hupp

Hupp is a native of rural western New York state. He was introduced to chemical research as an undergraduate student at Houghton College in New York, evaluating candidate electrode materials for heart pacers. He completed a B.Sc. degree in 1979. Subsequently he was a student of the late Mike Weaver at Michigan State University and Purdue University, completing a Ph.D. degree in 1983. He was a postdoc at the University of North Carolina. In 1986 he moved to Northwestern University where he is currently a Morrison Professor of Chemistry and a Senior Science Fellow in the Materials Science Division at nearby Argonne National Laboratory. He is the Deputy Director of the recently launched Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) sponsored by the Dept. of Energy. He is the team lead for “solar fuels” catalysis within the Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research (ANSER) Center, also a DOE-sponsored EFRC.  He recently completed an eleven-year stint as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

His research centers on energy- and defense-relevant materials chemistry, including materials for chemical separations, chemical catalysis, light-to-electrical energy conversion, catalytic water oxidation, high-capacity storage and release of molecular hydrogen, and capture and destruction of chemical warfare agents. His research accomplishments have been recognized with awards from the Sloan Foundation, the Dreyfus Foundation, the American Chemical Society, the Electrochemical Society, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Inter-American Photochemical Society, the Japan Society for Coordination Chemistry, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and others.  He has mentored 55 students to Ph.D. completion. His research findings, described in about 450 peer-reviewed articles and in about a dozen patents, place him among the world’s most highly cited chemists as assessed by Thomson-Reuters.