Christy Landes
Christy F. Landes is an American physical chemist who is the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Chair at Rice University. She seeks to understand the structure-function relationships in biological processes. She was appointed a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow in 2019. Early life and education. Landes was an undergraduate student in chemistry at George Mason University. She moved to Georgia Tech for her doctoral research, where she majored in physical chemistry under the supervision of Mostafa El-Sayed. After earning her doctorate, Landes joined the University of Oregon as a postdoctoral researcher, where she spent one year  before joining the University of Texas at Austin. Research and career. Landes joined the University of Houston at an assistant professor in 2006, and moved to Rice University in 2009. She was appointed Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Chair in 2021. Her early work considered super-resolution single molecule spectroscopy for the characterization of biomolecules. She has demonstrated that these approaches could be used to better understand cancer metastasis. She has also shown how silver ions disperse from the tips of gold-silver nanoparticle alloys, which may improve catalytic activity. Landes established the NSF Center for Adapting Flaws into Features (CAFF ) in 2021. The center investigates the defects in silicon-based electronics that hold promise for improving device performance, explore the structural and optoelectronic processes that make these flaws influential, and realize technologies that incorporate and exploit these flaws. Landes was elected Chair of the Physical Chemistry Division in 2020.