In the news

Noa Marom has been selected as the leader of a data science project that's part of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) Aurora Early Science Program (ESP). 

The program’s goal is to prepare key applications, libraries, and infrastructure for the architecture and scale of exascale computing. 

Marom’s project will combine quantum-mechanical simulations with machine learning and data science, to advance physical understanding of singlet fission and discover materials to create more efficient organic solar cells.

An artistic depiction of research from John Keith's lab was featured on the back cover of Royal Society of Chemistry journal Chemical Science. Yasemin Basdogan, a PhD student in Keith’s lab, designed the back cover image, which shows several molecules reacting in a cross-shaped container slowly filling with a liquid.

Their study titled “A paramedic treatment for modeling explicitly solvated chemical reaction mechanisms” analyzed a very complex chemical system called the Morita-Baylis Hillman reaction. Basdogan and Keith brought improvements to the modeling that allows better understanding of these types of chemical reactions that will impact areas of chemical engineering and chemistry. 

Giannis Mpourmpakis is collaborating with with Lubrizol Corporation, a specialty chemical manufacturer, on a project applying high-performance computing simulations to address a problem known as viscosity creep, a phenomenon which affects the performance of lubricating fluids.

Mpourmpakis focuses much of his research on the properties and potential applications of nanomaterials, employing Pitt CRC clusters for high-performance computation to create molecular level simulations. 

The results were published in June in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

Qi Li has received the Bright Futures Student Award from the International Precious Metals Institute for his work on gold nanoparticles. The $5,000 prize sponsored by the Gero Family Trust will be presented this month at the institute's annual conference in Texas.

Li, who works in the lab of Rongchao Jin, also has researched different models of "doping" gold nanoparticles, a process where a small amount of another metal is added to the nanoparticle.

Congratulations!
 

Congratulations to the 2018/2019 PQI Graduate Student Research Award Winners!

Ms. Azarin Zarassi  (Frolov Lab, Physics), Ms. Arailym Kairalapova (Jordan Group, Chemistry), Ms. Shreya Ghosh (SaxenaGroup, Chemistry), Mr. Shouvik Mukherjee (Snoke Group, Physics), Mr. Chenxu Liu (Pekker and Dutt Lab, Physics), and Mr. Minh Nguyen Vo (Johnson Group, Chemical Engineering) each won one term of graduate funding for the year 2018/2019.
 

Mukund Bapna received the 2018 Guy C. Berry Graduate Student Research Award. He was presented with the prize at the Mellon College of Science Graduate Student Town Hall in April.

He was working under the supervision of Sara Majetich on magnetic tunnel junction nanopillars, nanostructures. 

Bapna received his Ph.D. in May and is now heading off to Portland, Oregon, to work for the research and development team at Intel.

There he will be developing smart interconnects for nodes under 20 nanometers in size for next-generation processors.

The Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry Lecture is awarded to an outstanding chemical scientist who is highly regarded by her or his peers for significant contributions to an area of chemistry or related multidisciplinary area of chemistry. 

Jill Millstone has been selected as the Kavli Emerging Leader Speaker for 2019. Her seminar will be on Monday, August 20 at the Boston ACS Meeting.

Congratulations!

PQI faculty Geoffrey Hutchison, Sangyeop Lee, and David Pekker represented PQI on Intel ISEF 2018 Public Day.

Intel ISEF Public Day is an outreach program where middle and high school students from Pennsylvania (grades 6-12) participates in a hands-on, interactive day celebrating science.

Geoffery Hutchison had a booth at this event where he showed how to visualize chemistry by using computational methods via smartphone technology.

Sangyeop Lee presented the concept of waste heat recovery in a workshop.

David Pekker gave a lecture on quantum computers. 

The College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University has named this year’s faculty award winners, selected by the College of Engineering Faculty Awards Committee. 

Venkat Viswanathan received George Tallman Ladd Research Award. 

This award is given to a faculty member within the College of Engineering in recognition of outstanding research and professional accomplishments and potential.

Lilian Chong, the founder of Pitt’s Creative Science Writing Program, is leading a program on science and creativity along with Pitt English Instructor and award-winning poet, Sam Pittman.

In this program, they bring students from Chemistry and English together.

While she was demonstrating a simulation of molecules students work on poems describing molecular level emotions.