2024 Dunavant Faculty Professorship

Dunavant Professorships are endowed by a generous gift from William Dunavant in honor of Dr. Ralph Faudree who was dean of the college from 1995-2000. The College of Arts and Sciences awards one to four professorships annually. Awardees receive $5,000 per year for three years to support their research programs. Since 1999, over forty Dunavant Professorships have been awarded.

Xuan Zhao, Department of Chemistry

Dr. Xuan Zhao joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Memphis (UofM) in 2008. He received a doctorate degree at Texas A&M University in 2002 and carried out his postdoctoral studies at the University of Illinois before starting his independent career at UofM.

Dr. Zhao’s research endeavors have been to develop molecular catalysts for hydrogen production from the splitting of water with sunlight and electricity. The discovery of clean and renewable fuel resources is critical for future energy production in terms of environmental protection and global climate change. During his time at UofM, Zhao’s group has discovered a number of metal complexes that demonstrate to be among the most active catalysts reported in literature. His research work has been published in high impact journals such as Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Journal of the American Chemical Society, invited reviews in Comments on Inorganic Chemistry and European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry, as well as an e-book in the series of ACS In Focus. During his time at UofM, Dr. Zhao’s research has been continuously supported by NSF, including an NSF Career award in 2014. Dr. Zhao also led a team at UofM with other participants in the Memphis area to receive an MRI grant that helped to purchase a single crystal X-ray diffractometer (SC-XRD), such instrument allows for the opening of new course work at UofM on X-ray crystallography.