Florida State Chemist, Educator and Science Advocate Wins 2025 Corones Award
Kenneth Hanson, the Cottrell Family Associate Professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Florida State University, will receive the 2025 James Corones Award in Leadership, Community Building and Communication, the Krell Institute announced today.
The award is named for the Iowa-based nonprofit’s founder and recognizes mid-career scientists and engineers for research impact, mentoring, scientific-community activities and commitment to communicating science and technology. The award will be presented in November on the recipient’s campus in Tallahassee, Florida.
A committee of Krell Institute collaborators and staff recognized Hanson “for building lasting connections with colleagues, students and the public through online media and in-person engagement.” The committee also noted that “his ‘Ask a Scientist’ streams on the gaming platform Twitch and subsequent YouTube videos has built a community around his passion for science and scientific career development, and his ‘Get a Job, Ken!’ posts, with more than a million social media views, have helped a generation of graduate students and postdocs navigate the academic hiring process.”
Krell President Shelly Olsan noted Hanson’s “demonstrated commitment to making science accessible to broad audiences and generating interest in STEM fields and careers. Ken’s passion for and innovative approach to curriculum development and teaching have clearly inspired and served as a resource to students, colleagues and beyond, which would have resonated well with Jim (Corones).”
Hanson’s FSU group studies light-absorbing and -emitting molecules and their applications to solar-energy conversion. He has served on over 40 graduate student supervisory committees and is currently on the editorial advisory board for the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology. He is a two-time, top-five finalist for the AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science, and a recipient of the Tallahassee Scientific Society’s Gold Medal Award and the Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida’s Rising Star Award.
Before joining FSU in 2013, he was a postdoctoral associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hanson received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Southern California in 2010 after earning a B.S. in chemistry from St. Cloud State University in 2005. For more, visit his FSU website.
Corones, a renowned researcher and administrator, led Krell from its start in 1997 until shortly before his death in 2017, building an organization known best for managing the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, supported by the DOE Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and the NNSA-sponsored Stewardship Science and Laboratory Residency graduate fellowships. Before founding Krell, Corones was an Iowa State University professor and worked at the DOE-supported, Iowa State-based Ames National Laboratory. He held numerous lab posts from 1978 to 1997, including program director for applied mathematical sciences, program director for environmental technology development, deputy director and acting director.
The Krell Institute supports science, engineering, applied math and high-performance computing with management expertise and communications products, and collaborates with agencies and institutions to build and strengthen communities that foster the nation’s competitive advantage.