Faculty Candidate, 2023-2024

I’m looking for a tenure-track faculty position in chemistry, chemical engineering, or materials science! With my expertise in computational chemistry, data science, and electrochemistry, I provide unique tools to aid research programs related to catalysis, reaction engineering, and energy materials.

Aside from research and teaching (described below), I am committed to improving the practice of science. I think that, as scientists, we must respond to the pressing problems facing the world today, both technical (e.g. climate change, plastic waste, and air pollution) and social (e.g. systemic oppression, racism, and wealth inequality). I think deeply about ethics and try to conduct my research in a way that produces maximal collective benefit - for my own research team, the scientific community, and the public.

The research group that I found, the CoReACTER (Community of Researchers Assessing Chemical Transformations and Exploring Reactivity), will serve as a hub of academic activity on sustainable chemistry and its impacts. But more than that, CoReACTER will be a testbed for new ideas about the practice of chemical sciences and a network for mutual support.

Research

In my research, I seek to leverage a fundamental understanding of chemical reactivity to accelerate the transition towards sustainable chemical technologies. I operate at the intersection of computational modeling, data science, and systems engineering to address problems from the molecular scale to the industrial scale using theory and computation. My research program will focus on electrochemical and catalytic processes which are relevant to a variety of sustainable chemistry problems, with an early emphasis on electrolyte decomposition in metal-ion batteries and energy-efficient depolymerization of plastic waste and future interests in electrosynthesis. Because reactions in these domains typically occur far from equilibrium, with many species and reactions that may occur simultaneously and interfere with desired pathways, they are notoriously difficult to study and therefore require considerable attention.

Specifically, my early research will focus on the following themes:

1. Accelerating exploration of reactions using machine learning and network theory
2. Applying chemical reaction networks to optimize reaction cascades in electrochemistry and polymers
3. Extreme multiscale modeling of sustainable technologies, linking the atomic scale to the system scale

Teaching

My approach to teaching is grounded in the question: how can the classroom, in addition to a site for learning, be a site of wellness, safety, and excitement? This begins with the relationship between professor and student. Throughout the courses that I teach, I work to learn about the students as people and as learners. To give students a sense of ownership in the course and encourage them to actively engage as members of a learning community, I work collaborative with students in class to develop norms and expectations, and even to design course material. But community and communication alone are insufficient to ensure students have a safe and positive environment to learn. I leverage concepts from universal design for learning, designing curricula to ensure that all students have multiple means to engage with the course, absorb knowledge, and demonstrate their mastery of the course material.

My teaching interests:

• Core chemistry/chemical engineering/materials science: thermodynamics, kinetics, physical chemistry
• Technical electives: computational chemistry, electrochemistry
• Modern scientific ethics