Rate My Professor Stacy Copp

Stacy Copp is an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), holding courtesy appointments in the Departments of Chemistry, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Physics and Astronomy. She also serves as a Joint Appointee at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Copp earned her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics (summa cum laude) from the University of Arizona in 2011, M.A. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2013, and Ph.D. in Physics from UCSB in 2016, with a thesis entitled 'Optical materials with a genome: nanophotonics with DNA-stabilized silver clusters.' Following her doctorate, she held postdoctoral positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2017 to 2019 as a Hoffman Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, L’Oréal USA for Women in Science Fellow, and LANL Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined UCI as an Assistant Professor in 2019 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2025.

Copp’s research focuses on nanoscale photonic materials assembled from soft matter building blocks such as biomolecules and polymers, biomimetic nanomaterials, and materials informatics approaches to nanoscience. Her lab investigates DNA-directed assembly of metallic clusters and nanostructures, block copolymer-directed assembly of photonic nanomaterials, and high-throughput experimentation combined with machine learning to accelerate nanomaterials discovery. Her achievements have earned major awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2024), DOE Early Career Research Program Award (2024), DEVCOM ARL HBCU/MI Early Career Program Award (2024), AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award (2020), Hellman Faculty Fellowship (2023), and Scialog Fellowship (2024). Key publications include “Magic numbers in DNA-stabilized fluorescent silver clusters lead to magic colors” (The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2014), “DNA-protected silver clusters for nanophotonics” (Nanomaterials, 2015), “Chemistry-informed machine learning enables discovery of DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters with near-infrared fluorescence” (ACS Nano, 2022), and “An atom-precise understanding of DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters” (Accounts of Chemical Research, 2024). Her publications have garnered over 1,650 citations on Google Scholar.