Christian Knox, a graduate student from the Peng Liu group in the Department of Chemistry, has been selected by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program to conduct on-site doctoral thesis research at the Brookhaven national laboratory. Christian is one of 79 Ph.D. students from 56 universities across the country selected for this prestigious program. This award provides support for Christian's travel to and from the national laboratory, and a monthly stipend during the six-month award period. Christian will begin on July 1st to work with his collaborator, Dr. Dali Yang at the National Synchrotron Light Source II, to perform extended X-ray absorption studies of transition metal catalysis of organic reactions.
"I'm very excited to travel to Brookhaven National Lab to work on a joint computational and experimental study of organometallic catalysis with Dali Yang," said Christian. "My hope is to utilize the expertise of computational methods such as Density Functional Theory that we use in my lab, along with the expertise in X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy that is employed at the National Synchrotron Light Source II to provide evidence and explanation for the fundamental mechanistic processes that first-row transition metal catalysis can achieve."
