The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation has announced the selection of Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars for 2022, including Illinois chemistry faculty member Jefferson Chan.

The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program supports the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences. Based on institutional nominations, the program provides discretionary funding to faculty within the first five years of their careers. Criteria for selection include an independent body of scholarship attained in the early years of their appointment, and a demonstrated commitment to education, signaling the promise of continuing outstanding contributions to both research and teaching. The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program provides an unrestricted research grant of $100,000.

The funding will support photo acoustic imaging research in the Chan Lab: Light in, Sound out: Making Chemical Probes to Detect Invisible Disease States Using Photoacoustic Imaging. 

Chan joined the Illinois faculty in 2014. A Beckman Institute professor and affiliate of biochemistry, one of the research focuses in the Chan lab involves photoacoustic (PA) imaging, an imaging method that relies on the detection of sound waves generated by an optically excited chromophore. The approach enables non-invasive, deep-tissue bioimaging of live animals and human organs, and the Chan Lab is developing chemical probes for the early diagnosis of cancer, and is also applying these chemical tools to study tumor progression and metastasis in vivo.