Giannis Mpourmpakis awarded NSF for screening catalysts
The National Science Foundation has awarded Giannis (Yanni) Mpourmpakis $354,954 to continue his research into a promising but poorly understood method of creating olefins. Olefins, simple compounds of hydrogen and carbon, serve as the building blocks in chemical industry and are important for the synthesis of materials, including polymers, plastics and more. However, creating them can be problematic: it requires the use of fossil fuels, energy intensive “cracking” facilities, and limited production control. The team in Dr. Mpourmpakis’s CANELa lab will use computational modeling and machine learning to understand how the dehydrogenation of alkanes takes place on metal oxides, and use that knowledge to screen a wide range of metal oxides and their properties for use in the process.
Congratulations Dr. Mpourmpakis!
PQI organized its 3rd Quantum Day on Friday, April 12, 2019 for the students of Taylor Allderdice High School; a day full of activities, talks, lab tours, and of course pizza. About 20 students, mostly juniors and seniors, from Dr. Janet Waldeck's physics classes arrived early that day at the 321 Allen Hall, where they were greeted by PQI Director Jeremy Levy.
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Pitt is seeking course proposals for its Fall 2018 Term. OLLI courses are typically 1x a week for 5 weeks. Each term offers 2 sessions of courses. We seek course proposals in a variety of areas including: literature, history, political science and government, the arts, sciences, languages and more. Most OLLI designed courses are similar to actual college courses (but no tests or grades, abbreviated content, and shortened to run for 5 weeks).
Everyear PQI bring together the undergraduate interns, the incoming graduate class, as well as other USTC alumni who have been in Pittsburgh for few years or more at the UCTS Day Event. Last summer one of the attendees of this event was Hua Jiannan. In this article he shared his experiences at University of Pittsburgh.
Yale Quantum Institute invites applicants for the YQI postdoctoral fellowships. These Fellowships will support research in the field of quantum science for recent Ph.D. recipients in the group of any of the YQI faculty members. Candidates should have demonstrated excellent research ability in their prior work and exceptional promise for future leadership in their field of interest. Each candidate should indicate clearly which research group (or in special cases, groups) they intend to work with.