News

Stay up to date with the happenings of the Gagliardi group!

Found 322 Results

September 2016 People and Events

Sam Stoneburner, now a third-year graduate student, received the 2016 Robert and Jill DeMaster Fellowship, one of the Department of Chemistry’s Excellence Awards.

Sam was also invited by his undergraduate institution, Hillsdale College, to give an invited talk, “Catechol-Ligated Transition Metals: A Quantum Chemical Study on a Promising System for Gas Separation,” and to meet with current undergraduates to tell them about life in graduate school. Congratulations to Sam on both of these accomplishments!

Research and Publications

Laura gave a talk at the Materials Research Society’s 5th International Conference on Metal-Organic Frameworks & Open Framework Compounds (MOF2016)in Long Beach, California, on the work of the Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center.

August 2016 Research and Publications

The Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center (ICDC), a Department of Energy-sponsored Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC), held its annual All-Hands Meeting at The Saint Paul Hotel on August 15 and 16.

In addition, Prof. Ian Tonks of the University of Minnesota, a recently added principal investigator within the ICDC, gave a workshop on Reaction Mechanisms immediately following the All-Hands Meeting. Laura is the Director of the ICDC. Several members of the Gagliardi group, along with many postdocs and graduate students at the University, are members of the multi-institution ICDC.

July 2016 People and Events

Welcome to Xin-Ping Wu, who joins the group as a postdoc. He is co-advised by Don Truhlar.

People and Events

Laura is now a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry through its “Leaders in the Field” program.

Fellows in this program are outstanding individuals in the chemical science community.

People and Events

Laura has been named an associate editor for Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.

People and Events

Konstantinos (Kostas) Vogiatzis, postdoc in the Gagliardi group, has accepted a faculty position as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Congratulations, Professor Vogiatzis!

June 2016 People and Events

Welcome to two new postdocs in the Gagliardi group, Hakan Demir (co-advised by Chris Cramer) and Bo Yang (co-advised by Don Truhlar).

Research and Publications

Joshua Borycz successfully defended his thesis, “Computationally Driven Characterization of Magnetism, Adsorption, and Reactivity in Metal-Organic Frameworks.”

Congratulations, Dr. Borycz!

May 2016 Research and Publications

The Spring 2016 issue of the Frontiers in Energy Research newsletter features the work of the Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center, of which Laura is the Director.

An article, titled “Five Cents About Nickel Catalysts,” was co-authored by Gagliardi group postdoc and ICDC scientific coordinator Varinia Bernales.

Research and Publications

A theoretical study was recently performed by Gagliardi group postdoc and Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center (ICDC) scientific coordinator Varinia Bernales, within a collaboration of the members of the ICDC, on the NU-1000 metal-organic framework (MOF).

This study resulted in a major achievement – the discovery that the adsorption processes of glucose and cellobiose on the NU-1000 MOF occur at the hydrophobic sites. Until now, only enzymes have demonstrated the ability to selectively bond the β-linked dimer of glucose (cellobiose), while completely rejecting the bonding of glucose itself. Great work, Varinia!

Research and Publications

A collaborative team of researchers that includes Laura, along with Eray Aydil and Chris Leighton from the Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science (CEMS), have received a research grant to explore pyrite iron disulfide as a low-cost solution for renewable electricity.

This team was one of four at the University of Minnesota to receive a $717,360 grant from the Institute on the Environment’s Renewable Electricity for Minnesota’s Future grant program.

People and Events

Laura is the recipient of the 2016 Bourke Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, honored for her contributions to quantum chemistry.

This award honors the top scientists in their fields for the originality of their research, the impact of their research, quality of their publications, patents or software, innovation, professional standing, and collaborations and teamwork.

April 2016 People and Events

Graduate student Chad Hoyer is one of ten recipients of the Department of Chemistry’s 2016-17 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships (DDF).

The DDF program provides a stipend, tuition, and special travel grants to its awardees. Congratulations, Chad!

Research and Publications

As part of their Physical Chemistry Seminars series, Laura gave a talk, “Multireference Methods for Excited-States and Transition-Metal Containing Systems,” at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Research and Publications

Laura gave an invited talk at Harvard/MIT’s Inorganic Chemistry Seminar.

Research and Publications

Collaborative research led by Laura and Chris Cramer has been selected for publication in a special American Chemical Society (ACS) virtual issue on atomic layer deposition (ALD).

March 2016 People and Events

Ph.D. students Liam Wilbraham of Chimie ParisTech, France and Ági Szécsényi of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, join the group as visiting scholars during Spring 2016.

They will collaborate with Gagliardi Group members. Welcome to Liam and Ági!

Research and Publications

Five Chemistry graduate students at Minnesota, including Gagliardi Group member Josh Borycz, will present their research at the University’s 2016 Doctoral Research Showcase on April 6.

February 2016 Research and Publications

The Gagliardi and Cramer groups recently elucidated the mechanism of a single-site nickel catalyst synthesis and the catalytic activity thereof in an article published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Research and Publications

A collaborative team within the Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center presented an approach called nanocasting to provide a more thermally stable scaffold for MOF-based catalytic metal sites, making them suitable for high temperature catalysis.

January 2016 Research and Publications

Laura was one of the contributors to the U.S. Department of Energy: Winter 2015 Frontiers in Energy Research newsletter article, “Perspectives on Women in Energy Science.”

November 2015 People and Events

Three new Gagliardi group graduate students — Hung Pham, Debmalya Ray, and Prachi Sharma — join the ICDC.

Welcome!

Research and Publications

Collaborative work between the Gagliardi group, Cummins group of MIT, and Professor Nocera of Harvard University led to the isolation and characterization of a novel linear Co-O-Co core encapsulated inside a cryptand ligand. The work was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in an article entitled “Pushing MOM to the Right: A Cryptand-Encapsulated Co-O-Co Unit.”

People and Events

Joshua Borycz, graduate student, received a separate $600 travel award as part of his Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF).

He will use these funds to travel to the University of California, Berkeley, where he will attend the annual all-hands meeting of the Center for Gas Separations (CGS), an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) in which Minnesota participates. He will present work on CO₂ capture in MOFs (metal-organic frameworks), which is directly relevant to the mission of the CGS. Congratulations (again), Josh!