Beth Guiton, professor of chemistry, and Susan Odom, assistant professor of chemistry, in the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, have been selected as Scialog Fellows by the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement.

As fellows, Guiton and Odom will participate in Scialog: Advanced Energy Storage, a program involving early career rising stars, beyond postdoctoral appointment, interested in pursuing collaborative, high-risk, highly impactful discovery research on untested ideas applicable to creating breakthroughs in energy storage. The program has a format in which participants are encouraged to engage in dialogue and form new research teams, often multidisciplinary and composed of both theorists and experimentalists.

This Scialog initiative will center on two conferences to be held fall 2017 and 2018. Scialog meetings are attended by about 50 early career Scialog Fellows and 12 distinguished facilitators, with the goal of identifying bottlenecks, finding avenues for breakthroughs and building new scientific teams to pursue these ideas. The highly interactive conference format includes a limited number of keynote presentations to outline research challenges and small group discussions to encourage participant interactions.