Stay up to date with the happenings of the Gagliardi group!
Fourth-year grad student, Soumen Ghosh is one of seven graduate students selected by the Department of Chemistry for a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for the 2017-18 academic year. Soumen is co-advised by Chris Cramer. Congratulations, Soumen!
From June 1-9, Laura was on a lecture tour in the United Kingdom for the RSC Bourke award that she received in 2016. She gave lectures at Imperial College London, at the University of Sheffield, at the Faraday Discussion on New Directions in Porous Crystalline Materials in Edinburgh, and at the University of Southampton.
The theory faculty are happy to welcome four undergraduate students to Minnesota as participants in the first Chemical Theory Center/Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center summer program within the Department of Chemistry. They are here for 10 weeks (June-August) and will conduct research in theoretical chemistry. Katherine Kidder (Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA) is working in the Gagliardi group, under postdoc Andrew Sand, on multiconfiguration pair-density function theory; Hirbod Heidari (Sharif University, Tehran) is working in Don Truhlar’s group; Jason Goodpaster is advising Hunter Wilson (James Madison University, Harrisonburg, PA), and Qining Wang (Rutgers University) is part of Chris Cramer’s group. Welcome to all of you and we wish you the best with your summer research experience.
Postdoc, Varinia Bernales has been honored with one of two Wiley/ACS Computers in Chemistry Outstanding PostDoc Awards. From the award notification: “This award is a testimony of the high impact and quality of your research, and, as future leaders in the field, you are going to contribute in shaping the computational chemistry of the future.” Read more on the Department of Chemistry web site. This is quite an accomplishment!
Graduate student, Sam Stoneburner‘s recent paper, “Catechol-Ligated Transition Metals: A Quantum Chemical Study on a Promising System for Gas Separation”, was selected as the cover feature for the latest issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.
Undergraduate researcher, Molly Andersen, has received two fellowships: from the Department of Chemistry, the David A. and Merece H. Johnson Scholarship “for outstanding achievement in undergraduate research as well as overall scholastic excellence,” and from the School of Physics and Astronomy, the Hagstrum Award in Physics, which “is awarded to a senior in physics showing excellence and promise in their chosen field.”Congratulations to Molly.
The Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center (ICDC), a U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) is based at the University of Minnesota. Recently, a video showcasing the important work of the ICDC was produced. You can view it from the ICDC web site’s home page.
A paper co-authored by postdoc, Jing Xie, and graduate student, Debmalya Ray, published in the journal Nature Chemistry on April 24, was featured on the Department of Chemistry’s website (also on April 24). To read the article and for a link to the paper, click here.
As part of The American Chemical Society (ACS) 253rd National Meeting & Exposition on Advanced Materials, Technologies, Systems & Processes, April 2-6, 2017, in San Francisco, there was a Women in COMP breakfast on Tuesday, April 4. This was a mentorship opportunity for female postdoctoral scholars. In addition to this special program, Laura and Gagliardi group postdoc Jing Xie gave several talks at ACS.
The group welcomes new postdoc, Jenny Vitillo, from Università di Torino (University of Turin), Italy. She is co-advised by Laura and UMN Chemistry faculty member, Connie Lu. We are happy to have you here, Jenny.
The group welcomes visiting postdoctoral scholar, Walter A. Rabanal León of the Department of Chemistry at Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile, where he is a member of the Millennium Nucleus Molecular Engineering for Catalysis and Biosensors group.
The group welcomes three new members: postdoc Davide Presti, who comes to Minnesota from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy, University of Minnesota undergraduate researcher Michelle Anderson, and postdoc Carlo Gaggioli from Università degli Studi di Perugia, Perugia, Italy.
Second-year graduate students Prachi Sharma and Hung Pham passed their preliminary examinations. Congratulations to both!
On December 20, Laura gave the MARVEL NCCR Distinguished Lecture at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The lecture was on “Homogenous and heterogeneous catalysis: two challenges for modern quantum chemistry.” You can listen to and watch the lecture here.
On December 5, second-year graduate student Debmalya Ray passed his preliminary exam. Good job, Debmalya!
Jingyun Ye joined the group as a postdoctoral researcher. She is co-advised by Laura, Chris Cramer, and Don Truhlar. Welcome, Jingyun!
Laura received the 2016 Isaiah Shavitt Lecture Award from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in Tel Aviv. In mid-December, she travelled to Technion to give lectures and lead a symposium. Read more on the Department of Chemistry’s web site.
An article about Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), describing the work of some of the members of the Gagliardi and Cramer groups at Minnesota, along with other members of the Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center (ICDC), was featured in the News section of the Department of Chemistry’s web site. Read the article.
Laura and Don Truhlar, along with some of the postdocs in the Gagliardi group, were awarded 229,000 massively parallel processing (MPP) hours for computing projects at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) for 2017, as part of the efforts of the Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center (ICDC), of which Laura is the Director. Read the story on the Department of Chemistry web site.
Postdoc Dale Pahls has accepted a postdoctoral researcher position in the Materials Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois. We wish you the best, Dale!
First-year graduate student Matt Simons has joined the Gagliardi Group.
He is co-advised by Aditya Bhan in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (CEMS). Welcome to Matt.
Laura was one of the members of a Nanoporous Materials Genome Center (NMGC) team that has created a game that will teach young people about nanotechnology, engage them in working on a real-world problem and spark their creativity to build structures that will help solve a troublesome real-world environmental issue.