Caltech Expert Named Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar

Kimberly See, assistant professor of chemistry, has been named a 2023 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. The award is given to professors in the first five years of their academic career who have created “an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education,” according to a statement issued by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. Each scholar is given an unrestricted $100,000 research grant.

See’s research is focused on the development of new battery chemistries that store more energy than conventional batteries using cheaper and more sustainable materials. Her goal is to enable more effective use of sustainable energy sources like wind and solar, which are improved by battery storage due to their intermittent nature. See’s interest in sustainability is rooted in a childhood spent exploring the natural areas of Colorado.

She also works on synthetic electrochemistry in the NSF Center for Synthetic Organic Electrochemistry and on the creation of liquid fuels fromsolar energy as part of the Liquid Sunlight Alliance, for which Caltech serves as lead institution.

See has also been named a 2023 Sloan Fellow and a 2020 Packard Fellow. She also won the Beckman Young Investigator Award in 2019.

She is one of 18 individuals to receive this honor from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation in 2023. The foundation was established in 1946 by Swiss-American Camille Dreyfus in honor of his brother Henry. It aims to support research in chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields.