Megan A. Steves

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Dr. Megan Steves is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. She develops single-molecule and super-resolution microscopy methods to study the weak, transient interactions that underlie chemistry in complex biological systems. She received her B.A. in Chemistry and Art History from Messiah University and her Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and studied the nonlinear optical properties of 2D materials with Ken Knappenberger. She later joined the University of California, Berkeley as an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Scholar in the laboratory of Ke Xu, developing methods to accelerate single-molecule measurements for biological imaging. She joins the Illinois faculty in 2026.