Katherine Davis Receives Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellows Award

Katherine Davis, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Nozomi Ando, is a recipient of the 2015 Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellows Award.

The award is given to individuals who have shown great potential for success as an academic and future leader in the fields of science, engineering or technology. The fellowship funds the researcher for two years with the possibility of renewal for a third year. The award is named for Arnold Beckman, founder/chairman emeritus of Beckman Instruments, a top inventor who revolutionized the study of human biology.

Davis obtained her doctoral degree in physics from Purdue University. Her graduate work focused on the development of time-resolved X-ray spectroscopic methods to study the catalytic water-splitting cycle of photosystem II as well as synthetic catalysts. In the Ando lab, she is working on X-ray diffraction methods to investigate structural changes associated with catalysis in novel metalloenzymes. Like others in the group, she is a synchrotron junkie and has been on well over 30 synchrotron trips (six so far, as a postdoc).