Category Archives: People and Events

Grad students Valay Agarawal, Matthew Hennefarth, Ricardo Almada Monter, Zihan Pengmei, and Shreya Verma successfully complete their first year of graduate school and receive approval to prepare for their Ph.D. Candidacy Examination. Bravo, everyone!

Dr. Riddhish Umesh Pandharkar successfully defended his doctoral thesis with the title “Localized multireference methods for strongly correlated systems.” Riddhish has accepted a position at OpenEye Scientific as a Scientific Software Developer located in Santa Fe, NM. Congratulations, Riddhish!

Graduate student, Daniel King is one of two recipients of the Otto H. and Valerie Windt Memorial Fellowship. The award will provide a $400 honorarium and salary support during the 2022 – 2023 academic year. Way to go, Daniel!

Postdoc Dario Campisi‘s project proposal, “A new theoretical method of general applicability to study the chemistry of our solar system”, was recognized with a Seal of Excellence by the  European Commission submitted under the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions call HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01-01 — MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2021. The project was recognized as a high-quality project proposal in a highly competitive evaluation process but could not receive funding due to budgetary constraints and was therefore recommended by the European Commission for funding by other sources.

Laura has been elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, one of the world’s oldest existing learned societies. The German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina was founded in 1652 as a classical scholarly society and now boasts 1,600 members from almost all branches of science. Notable members include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Lister, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. Throughout its history, 186 members have won Nobel prizes. Read the article on Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering’s website.

The Gagliardi Group website has been awarded silver by the MUSE Creative Awards. This recognition is a part of the MUSE Awards Program, which was created by the International Awards Associate (IAA) in 2015. IAA’s inception was based on a mission to honor, promote and encourage creativity by providing a new standard of excellence for evaluating media design production and distribution. Read the announcement here.

Laura shares her research trajectory and projects, insights into the synergy between experimental and computational chemistry, and her advice for women and young scientists in Nature Computational Science. Read the interview here.

Graduate student, Ben Yeh, is selected as one of the recipients of a 2022 Kokes Award for the 27th North American Catalysis Society meeting in New York, NY being held on May 22-27, 2022. This travel award, sponsored by the North American Catalysis Society, provides funding for the conference registration fee and accommodation to encourage students to attend and participate in this biennial conference.

Sílvia Escayola, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Girona in Spain, joins the group as a visiting scholar during Winter 2022 to collaborate with Gagliardi Group members. Welcome, Sílvia!

The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) announced that four of its leading journals will be under the direction of new editors in chief beginning in 2022, with Laura leading the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (JCTC). Read the press release on the ACS website.