A subset of the group (left to right: Angelos, Christoph, Fabian, Niamh, Julia, Ben, Patrick, and Michael) pictured above. Not pictured are our smiles (hidden beneath our masks) and Andrea, Tai, Venkat and Chang Woo, who all couldn't visit due to COVID restrictions.
Wednesday, July 7, 2020
To celebrate our official start at Cambridge, the group finally met up in person for a socially distanced get-together today after nearly seven months of virtual meetings! We explored our soon-to-be offices in the Chemistry Department and also welcomed three new arrivals to the group:
- Venkat Kapil, who was awarded the highly competitive SNSF Early Career Postdoc Fellowship. He hopes to advance the accuracy of crystal structure prediction methods, which is the field involved with predicting the most stable crystal structures of a compound - one of the 'holy grails' of chemistry. Unfortunately, we couldn't properly welcome him in person today because of the mandated quarantine for incoming arrivals from Switzerland, but we will have many opportunities in the coming weeks!
- Niamh O'Neill, who is starting her CDT in Computational Methods for Materials Science. She is funded by the highly prestigious Gates Scholarship and plans to use machine learning interatomic potentials trained on highly accurate Quantum Monte Carlo simulations to study molecular crystals.
- Benjamin Shi, who is starting his PhD in Chemistry to work on developing methods of embedding sophisticated quantum chemistry methods to study materials. He has previously worked in the group as a summer student and liked it so much that he came back for a PhD.