Michael J. Therien is the William R. Kenan, Junior Professor at Duke University. He received his undergraduate education at UCLA and St. Andrews University. He earned his doctoral degree in chemistry at UCSD. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech, he took a faculty appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Alan G. MacDiarmid Professor. In 2008, his laboratory moved to Duke University. Earlier honors include Dreyfus and Sloan Foundation Fellowships, and young investigator awards from the Beckman Foundation, the Searle Scholars Program, the Society of Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines, and the NSF. He has been recognized with the ACS Philadelphia Section Award, elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and awarded the Francqui Chair in the Exact Sciences (Belgium). He was recently named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2021) and was recognized with the R. B. Woodward Award in Porphyrin Chemistry (2022), the American Chemical Society Florida Section Award (2023), and the Inter-American Photochemical Society Award in Photochemistry (2024).

As a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, Prof. Therien will be affiliated with the Weizmann Institute of Science, characterizing and determining the mechanisms of novel molecular and nanoscale materials that drive exceptional spin filtering and spin-polarized current magnitudes through the chiral induced spin selectivity effect.

Recent publications: 
Twisted Molecular Wires Polarize Spin Currents at Room Temperature, C.-H. Ko, Q. Zhu, F. Tassinari, G. Bullard, P. Zhang, D. N. Beratan, R. Naaman, and M. J. Therien, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2022, 119, e2116180119. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2116180119.
Electron Spin Polarization and Rectification Driven by Chiral Perylenediimide-based Nanodonuts, C.-H. Ko, Q. Zhu, G. Bullard, F. Tassinari, M. Morisue, R. Naaman, and M. J. Therien, J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2023, 14, 10271-10277. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.3c02722.
Band Gap Opening of Metallic Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes via Non-covalent Symmetry Breaking, F. Mastrocinque, G. Bullard, J. A. Alatis, J. A. Albro, A. Nayak, N. X. Williams, A. Kumbhar, H. Meikle, Z. X. W. Widel, Y. Bai, A. Harvey, J. M. Atkin, D. H. Waldeck, A. D. Franklin, and M. J. Therien, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2024, 121, e2317078121. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2317078121.