Category Archives: People and Events

Ph.D. student, Eva Vos of the Department of Chemistry at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain, joins the group as a visiting scholar during Summer 2019 to collaborate with Gagliardi Group members. Welcome Eva!</p>

Benjamin Yeh, co-advised by Laura Gagliardi and Aditya Bhan, has received a fellowship in the highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).His research focuses on measuring the kinetics and determining the reaction mechanism for the oligomerization of propenes and butenes on nickel-based metal-organic frameworks through experiment and computation.

Group member, Sam Stoneburner has received the 2018-19 Overend Award in Physical Chemistry in the theory/computation area.This award honors outstanding physical chemistry graduate student researchers and is named after Professor John Overend who was a physical chemist in the Department of Chemistry from 1960 to 1984.

On March 19, Laura gave the 32nd Annual Coulson Lecture at the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia.She received the plaque from Professor Henry F. Schaefer III.

Former graduate student, Joshua Borycz has accepted a position as STEM Librarian at Vanderbilt University. In this role he will be an advocate for library services to scientific researchers. In addition to teaching both graduate and undergraduate students how to conduct research more efficiently and how to organize and store research data, he will perform research to determine what tools and practices will most help faculty and students succeed in their coursework and research. Congratulations, Josh!

Soumen Ghosh, former graduate student, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers for his work in Prof. Frank Neese’s group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung. His goal is to develop accurate and efficient excited state electronic structure methods for open-shell chemical systems. He is developing new excited state methods for open-shell systems based on the similarity transformed equation of motion coupled cluster (STEOM-CC) approach. Conventional coupled cluster methods can only be applied to small and medium size chemical systems. However, the domain based local pair natural orbital (DLPNO) approach, developed recently by Neese and coworkers, have significantly reduced the cost of coupled cluster calculations. Soumen’s excited state methods will be combined with DLPNO approach to make them computationally more efficient. All these methods will be implemented in the computational chemistry software Orca.

Nora Planas has accepted a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where she will start in the summer of 2014.Nora, it has been great to have you in the group. We look forward to following your successful career at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Congratulations and good luck!

Postdoc, Davide Presti will soon return to Europe.It has been great to have you in the group and we wish you the best!

She was honored “for her contributions to the development of quantum chemical methods and their application to multireference systems containing metals, relevant to catalysis, and excited states.” With this award the Physical Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society recognizes the most outstanding scientific achievements of members of the Division. The 2019 recipients will be honored at the fall 2019 ACS National Meeting in San Diego.

Navneet Khetrapal, who recently completed his Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has joined the group as a postdoc.Welcome, Navneet!