Photo of Professor Robert Gilliard

Robert J. Gilliard, Jr. to Join the Faculty

Categories: Faculty

Gilliard will join the Department of Chemistry as the Novartis Associate Professor in 2023.

The Department of Chemistry is pleased to welcome Professor Robert J. Gilliard, Jr. to the faculty as the Novartis Associate Professor, beginning in 2023.

Gilliard earned his bachelor’s degree from Clemson University and his PhD from the University of Georgia. He completed joint postdoctoral studies at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) and Case Western Reserve University, and joined the University of Virginia faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2017. Gilliard spent time in the MIT Department of Chemistry as the 2021-2022 Dr. Martin Luther King Visiting Professor. Among his honors are a 2021 Packard Fellowship, and the 2023 Harry Gray Award for Creative Work in Inorganic Chemistry by a Young Investigator.

Gilliard’s research is multidisciplinary and combines various aspects of organic, inorganic, main-group, and materials chemistry. The Gilliard Group develops novel synthetic methods to access molecules that are relevant to a wide range of energy-related problems. Gilliard is best known for his creative synthetic chemistry involving main group elements in unusual oxidation states or bonding arrangements, with applications to energy storage and catalysis.