Jose Roque Named a 2026 Packard Fellow

Jose Roque, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, has been awarded a 2026 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Roque is one of just 20 early-career scientists, mathematicians, and engineers nationwide to receive the prestigious award, which was announced this morning.

Packard Fellowships are among the nation’s largest nongovernmental fellowships, designed to allow maximum flexibility in the use of funds. Each Packard Fellow receives $985K over five years to spend on research as they wish. The fellowships encourage “blue-sky thinking” that could one day foster discoveries to improve people’s lives and generate advancements through science.

Roque has been selected for his proposal “Metallomimetic Chemistry: Catalysis with Silicon.” His lab seeks to open the door to more affordable, sustainable catalysis through the use of silicon, bypassing our current reliance on expensive and environmentally impactful transition metals.

“These scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are asking ambitious questions about our bodies, our planet, and the technologies shaping our future,” said Nancy Lindborg, president and CEO of the Packard Foundation. “At a time of significant uncertainty in the research landscape, flexible, long-term support for early-career researchers matters more than ever.”

Roque said he got the news about the Packard during a Zoom call arranged by his former postdoctoral mentor and current colleague, Chemistry Department Chair Paul Chirik.

“When I joined the call with Paul, the program manager for the Foundation joined too. After a few introductions, she shared the news, and I was completely speechless,” said Roque. “For the first few seconds I genuinely thought I’d misheard her. Then, once it sank in, it took me another few minutes to form a coherent sentence.

“This award is an incredible honor and a huge source of motivation. It means so much to see the Packard Foundation supporting a mission that everyone in our lab feels strongly about,” he said. “Developing catalytic platforms based on silicon, the second-most-abundant element in Earth’s crust, is a huge scientific challenge. This fellowship gives us the opportunity to pursue that high-risk, high-reward research and bring some of our most ambitious ideas to life.

“Above all, this recognition reflects the creativity, dedication, and hard work of the students and postdocs in my lab.”

The award marks the Department’s sixth Packard Fellowship.

The catalytic process drives most modern manufacturing, but many of these processes still rely on expensive, hard-to-mine transition metals, raising cost, sourcing, toxicity, and environmental concerns. The Roque Group aims to harness the silicon found in sand to develop sustainable silicon-based catalysts and materials for applications ranging from the efficient synthesis of next-generation medicines and advanced materials to solar energy conversion and the breakdown of persistent pollutants. To realize this goal, the group is working to fundamentally alter silicon’s properties to achieve the reactivity required for these applications.

“The element in its +4 oxidation state is unreactive and so we need to come up with fundamental strategies in order to change its properties and develop catalysts based on this,” said Roque. “To do so, we draw principles from inorganic chemistry, photochemistry and organic chemistry to manipulate the environment around silicon using ligands that fundamentally change its properties in order to achieve the desired chemical transformation.”

Roque did his undergraduate work at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, where he studied reactions with singlet oxygen under Kevin O’Shea. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at Berkeley under the supervision of Richmond Sarpong, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow Honorable Mention and a Reaxys Ph.D. Prize finalist. He also earned a Bristol Myers Squibb Graduate Fellowship in synthetic organic chemistry. As a graduate student, Roque developed strategies for the skeletal editing of aliphatic amines and a unified approach to the total synthesis of reverse-prenylated indole alkaloids. In 2020, he took up his postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton Chemistry as a Presidential Postdoctoral scholar with Chirik, where he developed the concept of electronically-controlled C–H borylation.

Roque joined the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor in 2023.

The Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering were inspired by Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard to mark his commitment to strengthening university-based research in the United States. Since the Fellowships were created 38 years ago, the Packard Foundation has awarded more than $550M to support 755 scientists and engineers from 55 universities.