Javier Vela

Javier Vela is a University Professor and Associate Chair of Chemistry at Iowa State University. He is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He serves on the editorial advisory boards of ACS Applied Engineering Materials, ACS Energy Letters, Chemistry of Materials, Chemistry–An Asian Journal, and ChemNanoMat. Along with former and current coworkers, Dr. Vela is the author of over one hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications and patents on nanostructured materials, inorganic compounds, and their application to energy conversion, chemical catalysis, and fluorescence imaging. He has directed twenty doctoral and four master’s theses and successfully mentored numerous undergraduate researchers, among them three NSF graduate research fellowship awardees.

Dr. Vela has been a faculty scientist with the Ames National Laboratory since 2010. An active member of the American Chemical Society, he has served as Councilor for the Ames local section, Program Chair for the Midwest Regional Meeting in 2018, Treasurer of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry, and member of the Committee on Committees. Dr. Vela holds a BS (Lic.) in Chemistry from UNAM and a PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Rochester. After postdoctoral stints at the University of Chicago and Los Alamos National Laboratory, he joined Iowa State University in 2009. Granted tenure in 2015, he rose to the rank of full professor in 2019, and was named University Professor in 2020. He worked as Equity Advisor for the ISU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 2015 to 2021, and held the rotating John D. Corbett Endowed Professorship from 2020 to 2023. Dr. Vela was on FPDA (sabbatical assignment) at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, Italy as a Fulbright Scholar in 2024. He grew up in Xalapa (Veracruz), Mexico and is a proud US Citizen by naturalization.