Martha Anne Grover is an American chemical engineer and academic. She serves as a professor and chair of graduate studies in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Her research focuses on molecular self‑assembly, the emergence of biological functions, and the process‑structure‑property relationships of carbon‑based systems.
Education
Grover earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, including a year of research at the Armstrong Flight Research Center. She pursued graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, where she completed a master’s degree and a Ph.D. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Modeling and control of epitaxial thin‑film growth” (2003), employed Monte Carlo simulations to investigate thin‑film nucleation and growth.
Academic career
In 2002, Grover joined Georgia Tech as an assistant professor and has since advanced to a full professorship. She leads the Grover research group, which investigates macromolecular organization, origins‑of‑life chemistry, and the control of morphology in polymer‑based photovoltaic materials. Her work spans interdisciplinary collaborations, including astrobiology projects with Jennifer B. Glass.
Awards and honors
- 2004 National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
- 2011 AIChE Outstanding Young Researcher award.
- 2018 AIChE David Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer‑Based Chemical Engineering Education (the first woman to receive this award).
- 2020 Named an NSF ADVANCE Professor, advocating for gender and racial equity in STEM.
Selected publications
Grover’s notable publications include studies on prebiotic chemistry, such as “Ester‑Mediated Amide Bond Formation Driven by Wet‑Dry Cycles: A Possible Path to Polypeptides on the Prebiotic Earth” (Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2015), and contributions to ribosome visualization tools.
Grover’s contributions integrate chemical engineering principles with biological and materials science, advancing understanding of self‑assembling molecular systems and their applications in emerging technologies.