Munira Khalil

Munira Khalil is an American chemist who is the Leon C. Johnson Professor of Chemistry and 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 moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for doctoral research, where she developed coherent two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy to study the molecular structure of coupled vibrations on a picosecond timescale. Khalil moved to the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher, where she was made a Miller Fellow.

Research and career
In 2007, Khalili joined the University of Washington. Her research makes use of 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. In particular, she is interested in how solvents (e.g. water in photosynthesis) impact the electron transfer processes.

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

Awards and honors

 * 2007 Dreyfus New Faculty Award
 * 2008 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering
 * 2009 National Science Foundation CAREER Award
 * 2011 Chinese-American Kavli Frontiers of Science symposium
 * 2012 Sloan Research Fellowship
 * 2013 Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award
 * 2014 Journal of Physical Chemistry Lectureship
 * 2011 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow
 * 2017 American Physical Society Fellow
 * 2021 Elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences
 * 2022 Joe W. and Dorothy Dorsett Brown Foundation Brown Investigator Awards