Christy F. Landes is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Rice University in Houston, TX, with appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. After graduating with a BS from George Mason University in 1998, she completed a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003 under the direction of Prof. Mostafa El-Sayed. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon and an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, under the direction of Prof. Geraldine Richmond and Prof. Paul Barbara, respectively, before joining the University of Houston as an assistant professor in 2006. She moved to Rice in 2009.
Christy is an active member of the American Chemical Society and the Physical Chemistry Division, and was elected to be Vice-Chair Elect, Vice-Chair, Chair-Elect and Chair of the Division from 2020-2023. One of her interests is in bringing scientists together to form communities that span different areas of expertise. She has organized national, regional, and local symposia. She serves as a senior editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, on the Editorial Committee of the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry and on the Editorial Advisory Board of ACS Nano.
The Landes Group is comprised of chemists, applied physicists, and engineers who develop next-generation tools to image dynamics at soft interfaces at the limit of a single event. Her group devises new methods and models for controlling macroscale processes such as protein separations and photocatalysis using this super-resolved chemical knowledge. The group also uses advanced signal and image processing methods to improve accuracy and precision in low-signal measurements. Christy’s outreach activities emphasize the importance of mathematics and computer programming in our increasingly data-driven world. Her goal for the community goal is to underscore our common values despite the expanding need to broaden and redefine our respective specializations.