Chemist Katherine Mirica Receives Inaugural Dartmouth Rising Star Innovator Award

Katherine Mirica, associate professor of chemistry, was chosen to receive the inaugural Dartmouth Rising Star Innovator Award. The award, which was bestowed by the Dartmouth Office of Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer on April 8, honors outstanding early-career faculty who are pursuing research, innovation, and entrepreneurial thinking at Dartmouth.

"I'm very honored and grateful to be recognized in this way," says Mirica. "It really validates the efforts of my students and what we've accomplished so far."

Mirica was chosen in recognition of her work developing materials and devices with potential applications in environmental stewardship, healthcare, and microelectronics.

"The research Mirica is leading at Dartmouth is innovative and ripe for technology commercialization," says Eric Fossum, vice provost for entrepreneurship and technology transfer. "She is the embodiment of a 'rising star' innovator."

"Katherine's remarkable ability to turn fundamental chemistry into innovative applications aimed at real-world problems in healthcare, environmental monitoring, and other current challenges make her a powerhouse in the field," says professor Jane Lipson, associate dean for the sciences. "She is a wonderful inaugural choice for this award."

Mirica's group develops unique substances or "materials" by combining metallic and organic molecules. To the naked eye, these materials look like black dust, which can be used to coat membranes or fabric. At the molecular level they contain pores that enable them to sense, filter, and detoxify other substances, such as toxic gases.

"We think that these materials could work as smart membranes for ensuring access to clean air in areas that are highly polluted, by alerting people that they're being exposed to pollution and providing a filtration function," says Mirica. "It could be used as a wearable device, such as a mask, or it could be a filter that's installed in the home to purify indoor air."

To create the materials, Mirica's team selects molecular building blocks and reaction conditions that enable self-assembly.

"You can kind of think of them as Legos or Tinker Toys where we put in the building blocks that are necessary for their assembly into the reaction flask and then the material has the opportunity to build itself," says Mirica.

Mirica joined the Department of Chemistry in July 2015. Before that, she earned her PhD from Harvard University and worked as an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"I've been interested in the potential commercialization of technologies ever since my PhD," says Mirica. "I trained in very interdisciplinary environments, both during my time at Harvard and at MIT, and both my PhD advisor and my postdoc advisor have started companies and are basically serial entrepreneurs. I definitely see myself as following their footsteps and developing technologies that could have applied and practical potential."

So far, Mirica's research at Dartmouth has produced 11 Dartmouth invention disclosures, 12 U.S. patent filings, and five issued patents. She's currently working with her graduate students and postdocs to develop a startup company.

"With the PhD Innovation Program, I'm working with the students who are co-inventors of those patents to carefully think through various aspects of commercialization," says Mirica. "I hope that within the next year, we might be forming a startup company."

The team also continues to develop new materials with different properties and to explore other potential applications in environmental remediation and beyond.

"We are really excited about the broad potential of the materials that we're developing in environmental remediation," says Mirica. "We have worked quite a bit in toxic gas detection related to air quality monitoring, but recently we discovered that these materials may also be applicable to water filtration and remediation."

Exploration is also underway to use the materials as catalysts for carbon dioxide reduction. "This could have important implications for the carbon neutral economy, and we're also exploring these materials' potential for energy storage applications," Mirica says. 

Among her many additional honors, Mirica received Dartmouth's 2021 Karen E. Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Creative or Scholarly Achievement and the 2020 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, which supports the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences.