The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced on April 29, 2025, that Professor Martin Zanni had been elected as a member. Professor Zanni is one of 120 members elected this year in recognition of distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Thirty international members were also elected.
Martin T. Zanni is the Meloche-Bascom Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, working with Dan Neumark, and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with Robin Hochstrasser. Notably, he is the only person to have received the ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award as both a student and a mentor and the first person to receive the Craver, Coblentz, and Lippincott Awards.
Professor Zanni is one of the early pioneers of 2D IR spectroscopy and has made many technological innovations that have broadened the capabilities and scope of multidimensional spectroscopies and microscopies. His research group is well known for developing a new class of ultrafast multidimensional spectroscopies. They can correlate the vibrational motions or the electronic states of different molecules or different parts of the same molecule. That information can be used to study molecular structures, like protein structures, or energy transfer, such as between two quantum dots. His research group has developed technologies for these techniques that have become the default methods by which they are implemented. In fact, in 2012, along with a postdoctoral researcher, Chris Middleton, Professor Zanni started a company called PhaseTech to commercialize this technology based on patents with WARF that they had written. With the application of 2D infrared spectroscopy, the Zanni group studies a protein involved in type 2 diabetes, cataract formation, and the motions of potassium ion channels. They utilize 2D visible spectroscopy to study a new type of solar cell made from semiconducting carbon nanotubes and microcrystals of organic molecules that can split energy from sunlight in half, thereby increasing the amount of electricity a solar cell can generate.
“There are few places in the world where we could have attracted so many talented people to pull off these scientific feats.” — Prof. Martin Zanni
On September 19, 2025, introduced by NAS member Emeritus Professor Fleming Crim, Professor Zanni presented a special seminar entitled, “Contributions to the Development and Application of Ultrafast 2D Spectroscopy,” to celebrate his election into the NAS, which provided brief synopses of two of many scientific directions during his 23 years at UW–Madison. Professor Crim is also a member of the NAS. Professor Zanni remarked that while he has earned many awards and recognitions in his career, this honor is the pinnacle. “It comes on top of 23 years of hard work by my graduate students and postdocs, working together to create and implement our ideas,” he remarked. He credited his work to the talents of his group and the support of the department. “There are few places in the world where we could have attracted so many talented people to pull off these scientific feats,” he said. “Our department houses roughly 40 research groups, each of which is like a small business. On top of that, there are probably five different groups of people working like collaborative co-ops, teaching thousands of students each year, and this is all only possible because of our dedicated staff.” Professor Zanni remarked, “I cannot imagine my job without these teams and support staff.”