Grace Panetti will be joining the Johns Hopkins Department of Chemistry as a professor on July 1.

Grace Panetti was raised in Rock Hill, SC and received her Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Clemson University in 2015. Between 2015–2021, she performed inorganic chemistry research at the University of Pennsylvania with advisors Prof. Eric Schelter and Prof. Patrick Walsh. At the University of Pennsylvania, she investigated the impact of redox events towards synthesis, organic chemistry, and photocatalysis. Afterwards, she moved to Princeton University to work with advisors Prof. Paul Chirik and Prof. Gregory Scholes as a BioLEC Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow from 2021–2024. At Princeton, she investigated the photophysical properties of metal nitrides, and the impact that their excited state manifolds have towards the synthesis of ammonia. Grace Panetti will begin as an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins Department of Chemistry in July of 2024.

The Panetti Lab will investigate challenges at the interface of photochemistry and inorganic chemistry. Light offers a way to discreetly add energy to molecules to place them in excited states. These excited states coupled with the reactivity and physical properties of metals allows for their use in small molecule functionalization and more efficient light utilization.  The Panetti Lab will use inorganic synthesis coupled with photophysical techniques like transient absorption spectroscopy to investigate these new systems.