Munira Khalil

Munira Khalil is an American chemist who is the Leon C. Johnson Professor of Chemistry and former department chair at the University of Washington.

Early life and education

Khalil attended Colgate University, where she majored in chemistry and English and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where she developed coherent two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy to investigate the molecular structure of coupled vibrations on a picosecond timescale. Khalil then moved to the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher, where she was a Miller Research Fellow.

Research and career In 2007, Khalili joined the University of Washington. In her research, she uses ultrafast spectroscopies to understand the structural dynamics of molecules. Photoinduced charge transfer depends on an interplay between atomic and electronic processes on multi-dimensional energy surfaces. She develops 3D electronic-vibrational femtosecond spectroscopies to understand vibrational and electronics motions on femtosecond timescales.

Khalil was appointed chair of the department of chemistry in 2020.

Awards and honors 2003-2006 Fellow of the Miller Institute 2008 David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering 2009 National Science Foundation CAREER Award 2012 Sloan Research Fellowship 2013 Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award 2014 Journal of Physical Chemistry Lectureship 2011 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow 2021 Elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences 2022 Joe W. and Dorothy Dorsett Brown Foundation Brown Investigator Awards 2025 David Thorud Leadership Award

Selected publications