Lori Zaikowski

Professor Lori Zaikowski, Ph.D., graduated from Stony Brook University with masters and doctoral degrees in chemistry. She has over 25 years experience teaching chemistry at the undergraduate, graduate, and high school levels. Throughout her career, she has worked closely with diverse populations of high school students in various summer and academic year programs to inspire young people through the applications of chemistry and other sciences. With funding from the Dorr Foundation, she founded the Chemistry in Action Research program at Dowling College to engage high school and college students in environmental investigations on New York’s Long Island South Shore Estuary. Through funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, Professor Zaikowski collaborates with her students and colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory studying electron transfer processes and energetics of charge separation in "molecular wires" with applications to organic solar materials and electronic devices such as LEDs. She believes that chemistry has the potential to solve many problems that society faces, and that everyone should have a basic knowledge of chemistry.