Electrochemist wins 2025 Dreyfus Prize

On Thursday, Héctor Abruña, an electrochemist and Émile M. Chamot Professor at Cornell University, was named winner of the 2025 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences. The $250,000 prize is awarded every other year by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation for work that advances a major area of chemistry. This year’s award recognizes a scientist in the field of electrochemical processes. A public ceremony for Abruña will be held at Cornell later this year.

Abruña is cited for “revolutionizing the fundamental understanding of electrochemical interfaces using X-ray, TEM, and mass spectrometric methods and for the development of novel materials for electrochemical devices.”

The prize recognizes Abruña for techniques he developed to observe electrochemical reactions as they occur in real time. One especially visual example is doing “electrochemistry inside a transmission electron microscope, because you can see the atoms moving,” Abruña says. “That really is something else.”

Such operando techniques yield valuable information about electrochemical systems that other approaches cannot provide. “The experiment is a little bit more involved, but you make absolutely zero approximations,” Abruña says.

Without hesitation, Abruña says he is most proud of his students. “I've been enormously fortunate in the people who have worked with me” in the last 4 decades, he says. Over the years, Abruña has mentored 66 doctoral students and more than 70 postdoctoral fellows. In addition to receiving the Dreyfus Prize, Abruña was also recently recognized with the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award. “I accept all awards in the name of all of the people who've done the work. They're amazingly talented and dedicated,” he says. “It's humbling beyond description.”