Caltech Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering

In memory of Donald Voet (BS '60), the Voet family generously supports a range of initiatives to make science more accessible to students from all backgrounds.

Congratulations to Mike Vicic on being awarded The Shirley M. Malcom Prize for Excellence in Mentoring! Vicic is a teaching professor in chemical engineering. Students who nominated Vicic praised him for helping them build confidence in themselves. Outside of the classroom, Vicic was noted for assisting students with everything from course selection and study skills to interviewing for jobs and utilizing Caltech's alumni network to help them select graduate schools or careers. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/gXuptZtk

Scott Cushing and Ryan Hadt have been selected to receive Sloan Research Fellowships in 2025! The fellowships "honor exceptional researchers at US and Canadian educational institutions, whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders." Recipients are awarded a two-year $75,000 stipend that can be used flexibly to advance the fellow's research. https://lnkd.in/ghymvsWG

Zhen-Gang Wang has been elected as a member to the National Academy of Engineering Class of 2025?for unifying theories of thermodynamic and transport properties of polymers to predict phase behavior, self-assembly, and nucleation.?NAE members are among the nation’s most knowledgeable engineering experts and election to the NAE is one of the highest professional honors accorded an engineer. Congratulations Zhen-Gang! #NAE2025 https://lnkd.in/gbTTCxry

Former chemical engineering professor Fred Shair, who founded Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program in 1979, died January 16. He was 88 years old. https://lnkd.in/gJFW687g

Our Winter 2025 Newsletter is now out! ?? We're covering: -Newly published research -The Career of Alison Ross, our Chemistry Graduate Option Manager who has served the Institute for 30+ years - Introduction of two new faculty members - Recaps of Division events + more!

Prof. Rustem Ismagilov, Caltech's Ethel Wilson Bowles and Robert Bowles Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Merkin Institute Professor, and director of the Jacobs Institute for Molecular Engineering for Medicine, has received a four-year grant to develop two innovative tools that hold the promise of greatly improving scientists' ability to detect, sequence, and identify viruses. His lab has a long history of developing precise quantitative measurements of biological entities down to the single-molecule level, including in complex sample types such as human biopsy samples. https://lnkd.in/g6MU-kTZ

Please join us in welcoming our newest Professor of Chemistry, Sandeep Sharma! He earned his bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and a Ph. D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2009). His postdoctoral work was done in the groups of Garnet Chan (then at Princeton University) and Ali Alavi (at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart) before starting his independent career at University of Colorado, Boulder in 2016. His group's research e?orts are directed towards developing algorithms that solve the problem of electronic structure theory. He loves to spend time with his family which include his wife and two children. In his free time he enjoys playing racket sports of any kind, tennis, squash, table-tennis, badminton.

Congrats to Justin Bui, a postdoc in Chemical Engineering!

In a?paper?recently published in the journal?Science, researchers in the Hadt lab describe how a class of molecules can be used in combination with femtosecond pulses of light (lasting just a few millionths of a billionth of a second) to measure instances of superposition at room temperature. Specifically, they show how to measure electron spin superpositions, a quantum mechanical property that determines the direction of a magnetic field produced by an electron. https://lnkd.in/gBVcCXj3