Category Archives: People and Events

High School student, Maddy Oakes has joined the group this summer and will primarily work on understanding noncovalent interactions in supramolecular systems.Welcome, Maddy!

She recently completed her Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry at the University of Alberta. Welcome, Meagan!

This is one of the University’s highest faculty awards. It acknowledges the critical contributions of important University faculty who have distinguished themselves and their departments in the missions of research, education, and public engagement.

Fourth-year graduate student, Prachi Sharma has been awarded a highly competitive Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year. Prachi’s research interests focus on developing novel quantum mechanical methods that can accurately describe electron-electron interactions. She is using these methods to predict chemical properties of actinide-transition metal complexes, which are important for catalysis, study of electronic spectra and excited state properties of various organic and inorganic molecules.

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.