UVA's Top Research Honor Goes to Chemistry Professor
A University of Virginia chemistry professor on Friday received a Thomas Jefferson Award, the highest University honor bestowed upon a member of the UVA community.
Jill Venton, the University’s Thomas Jefferson Professor of Chemistry in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, was presented the Thomas Jefferson Award for Scholarship during a Board of Visitors luncheon in the Dome Room of the Rotunda.
The annual award recognizes a faculty member whose career reflects exceptional achievement in scholarship, a deep commitment to educating students, and meaningful service to the University community.
Venton started her career at UVA in 2005 and is widely recognized as one of the leading figures in analytical neurochemistry. Her work has transformed how scientists study the brain through innovations in electrochemical sensing, carbon nano materials, and Fast-scan cyclic voltammetry, an electroanalytical technique used in neuroscience to measure the rapid fluctuations of dopamine, serotonin and other neurotransmitters.
“She has made it possible to observe chemical signaling in the brain in real time and with unprecedented precision,” said Brie Gertler, interim Provost, in her award presentation to Venton. “Professor Venton's discoveries have fundamentally changed our understanding of how neurotransmitters function and communicate, opening new avenues for research into neurological disorders, addiction, depression and neurodegenerative diseases.”
In her remarks at Friday’s award luncheon, Venton credited the University of Virginia’s role with fostering an environment that has supported and encouraged her research goals since her start on as an assistant professor.
“What I knew from my interviews and discovered in my first days on Grounds was that this was a very welcoming place where interdisciplinary research was not only accepted but championed,” Venton said. “Here I was, a tried-and-true chemist, trying to fabricate tiny new electrochemical sensors to put in the brain to understand real-time neurotransmission and disease.
“Other places I interviewed told me that ‘wasn’t chemistry enough,’ but at UVA I was welcomed by both a chemistry and neuroscience community who believed in me and my vision.”
Venton credits the colleagues with whom she’s collaborated in UVA’s neuroscience community, including biology professor Barry Condron, neurosurgeon Jeff Elias and associate professor of psychiatry Wendy Lynch, for helping her to build her research in invaluable ways.
Venton has published more than 125 peer-reviewed papers, and her work has been cited more than 13,000 times, but she is also a gifted teacher and dedicated mentor “whose former students and postdoctoral scholars now contribute to academia, industry, medicine, and government across the country and around the world,” Gertler added.
“My greatest accomplishment is the people who I’ve trained who are able to do this amazing research. It is such a privilege to be able to shepherd undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs and research scientists to learn more about chemistry and the brain,” Venton said. “We are still an education institution first, and I will always be a professor and educator at heart.
“The thing I love most about my job is working with students in the lab in the act of discovery. So today with this award, I celebrate them and all their accomplishments.
The Thomas Jefferson Awards have been presented annually to members of the University community since 1955. Dudley Doane, UVA’s retired International Studies Office director and former senior advisor of global affairs, received this year’s Thomas Jefferson Award for Service.
