Title: She Grew Crystals in Her Living Room. Now She Grows Crystals in Her Chemistry Lab.

As a young girl, Karah Knope remembers her parents coming home from their family-owned bookstore with science experiment books and crystal growing kits.

She was fascinated by the crystals — an interest that continued through grade school.

For every science fair, she would always produce a crystal garden.

“I don’t know if it’s the color. I don’t know if it’s the faces. I don’t know if it’s the symmetry. I don’t know what does it for each person, but there are a lot of people who get excited about crystals,” she said. “I think they’re beautiful.” 

While Knope can’t pinpoint what about crystals captivated her years ago, they’ve held her attention since.

Knope is a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences. As a chemistry professor, she still grows crystals. But she’s no longer growing crystals in her childhood living room. She runs a university lab where she studies inorganic chemistry and its applications to energy and sustainability. 

On the side, she’s also invested in inspiring the next generation of scientists to be just as fascinated by crystals as she is.

Discovering Her Research Niche

Knope started as a biology major at Lake Forest College, but it didn’t take long for her to find her calling in chemistry. 

One day during a general chemistry lab, her professor approached her with an add/drop form and told her that she wasn’t a biology major but a chemistry major.

Knope got the hint.

“I was young and kind of impressionable,” she said. “I said, ‘Well, I guess if he thinks I’m good at chemistry, I’m going to switch.’”

During her junior year, Knope dived deep into research and worked with the same chemistry professor. The project? 

Growing crystals.

“When I figured out I could do that, I was hooked,” Knope said of when she realized growing crystals could extend beyond science experiments for children.

After she graduated, Knope took time away from school to explore professional research opportunities. She first worked at a psychiatric research lab at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and then in a biochemistry lab at the University of Vermont.

But she was always drawn back to inorganic chemistry and decided to pursue her Ph.D. at George Washington University in the subject.

“It all brought me back to the realization that I’m an inorganic chemist,” she said. “It’s not just making crystals, but it’s understanding things like structure-property relationships, why certain compounds form and why they behave the way they do. Those three ‘gap’ years confirmed for me that it wasn’t just research I loved. It was really inorganic chemistry.”

Finding a Home at Georgetown as a Researcher and Teacher

In 2014, Knope was studying heavy elements chemistry at the Argonne National Laboratory as a staff scientist when she got the opportunity to go to Georgetown.

Working at the National Laboratory, Knope had missed seeing students get excited when they first saw a chemical reaction and having ‘aha’ moments. And she missed mentoring students.

“I worked with a lot of brilliant people. We were at the edge of our field and it was very fulfilling scientifically,” she said. “But I missed interacting with students and seeing people get excited when they make their first crystal or when they’ve been hard at work at a synthesis and it finally works.”

Knope began working in Georgetown’s chemistry department as the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in Chemistry in 2014, a position that allowed her to mentor both graduate and undergraduate students.

In her lab, Knope researches the chemistry of critical materials, heavy elements and luminescent compounds and their intersection with energy and sustainability. In one of her projects funded by the Department of Energy, Knope’s lab investigates how to separate lanthanides, critical elements used in batteries, displays, catalysts, motors and generators, and other hi-technological applications .

“With energy production comes waste production, and how we handle that waste can have serious implications for the environment,” she said. “We’re interested in understanding fundamental chemistries that are driven by our need to create energy but then also the byproducts of that.”

Fundamental to these needs, Knope’s research comes back to what got her started in chemistry: growing crystals.

A Passion for Science Education

In addition to her focus on energy and sustainability, Knope is focused on the next generation.

Growing up, she found her own way to science through crystals. She doesn’t remember having science nights or scientists visiting her elementary school to conduct experiments or talk about their jobs.

But she knows how important role models were for her career and wishes she had more exposure to professional scientists from an early age.

“I think it was very simply somebody saying, ‘You can do this.’ So I think mentorship and just that visibility of showing people is important,” she said.

Knope wants to change that for the next generation, bringing science closer to children around the country.

Every October during National Chemistry Week, Knope helps organize the U.S. Crystal Growing Competition for K-12 students nationwide. In 2023, Georgetown hosted the judges, who rank crystals according to their color, clarity and shape, just like a jeweler might classify a diamond, she said.

Competitors are sent a crystal growing kit with salt and directions and have a month to grow a crystal to compete for categories ranging from best overall crystal to “coolest crystal,” Knope’s favorite category to judge.

Submissions have included everything from crystals with Lego figures to a crystal inspired by the Angry Birds mobile game. One entry even had a 3D-printed figure holding a luminescent crystal. Crystals provide an entryway into science, Knope said.

“It’s a way to expose kids to science, that they can grow crystals and set up different solutions and see what does adding more water do,” she said. “They’re doing a science experiment, so I think it makes it accessible, and they’re all excited about it. Those opportunities are important because I think that’s how you can spark an interest.”

In the DC area, Knope also taps into science nights at local schools to show experiments and scientific principles at work, collaborating with teachers to tie demonstrations with students’ curriculum.

During the science nights, students might make bouncy balls with glue and boric acid solutions, freeze flowers with liquid nitrogen or detect benign levels of radioactivity in rocks containing uranium with a Geiger counter from Knope’s lab.

Seeing young students become fascinated by science reminds Knope of her own early fascination with crystals. Now a mother, Knope sees herself in her 7-year-old son, who has also begun growing his crystals with his friends.

“I love sitting in our kitchen with him and seeing him get excited about having this solution and then a day later he has a little crystal and watching it grow. He checks it every day. It’s fun to see.”