Catherine J. Murphy received two B.S. degrees, one in Chemistry and one in Biochemistry, from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1986. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1990. She was a National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1993. In 1993, she joined the faculty of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, becoming the Guy F. Lipscomb Professor of Chemistry in 2003. In 2009 she moved to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as the Peter C. and Gretchen Miller Markunas Professor of Chemistry. Professor Murphy has been honored for both research and teaching as a Camille Dreyfus Teacher- Scholar, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, a Cottrell Scholar of the Research Corporation, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award winner, and a subsequent NSF Award for Special Creativity. She has also received a USC Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award, the USC Golden Key Faculty Award for Creative Integration of Research and Undergraduate Teaching, the USC Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the USC Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. From 2006–2011, Professor Murphy served as a Senior Editor for the Journal of Physical Chemistry; in 2011 she became the Deputy Editor for the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2008), the American Chemical Society (2011), the Royal Society of Chemistry (2014), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2015). Professor Murphy's research program focuses on the synthesis, optical properties, surface chemistry, biological applications, and environmental implications of colloidal inorganic nanomaterials.