(September 24, 2019) Associate Professor Amanda Morris was approved as the recipient of the Patricia Caldwell Faculty Fellowship by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors at their August 2019 meeting.

The Patricia Caldwell Faculty Fellowship was established in 2019 by a generous donation from Ms. Patricia Caldwell ’71 to enhance the national and international prominence of the Virginia Tech College of Science. The goal of the fellowship is to recognize faculty dedicated to extraordinary research and teaching, to recruit scholars with exceptional records of achievement, and to retain high-performing faculty members who make significant contributions to the university’s research efforts and beyond. Prof. Morris will hold the Fellowship for three years with possible renewal.

Prof. Morris joined the department in 2011 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2017. In her eight years with the department, she has published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles and attracted over $2 million in funding. She has also won numerous external awards including the Inter-American Photochemical Society young Investigator Award in 2017, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2016, and a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2016. She also has a robust research program, having graduated 7 Ph.D. students and mentored 40 undergraduate researchers.

Prof. Morris has also been featured in local news and radio programs for her research in solar energy harvesting and storage. Her work, inspired by nature’s photosynthetic system, has led to advances in catalysis and light harvesting mimics, specifically in the realm of metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Her investigations of energy transfer phenomena in MOFs have led to transformative scientific results that have broken previous scientific precedence and thought and have major implications for energy transfer systems.

Congratulations, Amanda!