Dr. Shen Dillon is an Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Shen received his Bachelor’s degree and Doctorate of Philosophy in Materials Science and Engineering from Lehigh University in 2002 and 2007. Following his graduation in 2007, Dr. Dillon went to work as a Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University and Visiting Professor at Lehigh University. At Carnegie Mellon, the focus of his work was three-dimensional characterization of microstructures in order to obtain data critical to understanding microstructural evolution. Shen spent the 2008 academic year as a Visiting Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on materials for energy storage, before joining UIUC as a faculty member. As part of his CAREER program, Shen will quantitatively establish relationships between properties of individual heterojunction nanowires and their performance as photocatalysts. His approach includes in-situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to quantify the rate of photocatalytic gas evolution at individual nanostructures, ex-situ characterization to extend the structural and chemical information, and electrical measurements to obtain photoconductivity and relaxation data. This work will help to optimize high-efficiency, low-cost heterojunction photocatalysts that might lead toward new approaches to enhancing photocatalytic efficiency and new experimental methods for studying photochemistry at the nanometer scale.