News

AIChE’s magazine Chemical Engineering Progress highlighted Prof. Green’s recent Perspective in the AIChE Journal (https://aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aic.17059) in its Nov. 2020 article “AIChE Journal Highlight: Moving from Postdictive to Predictive Kinetics in Reaction Engineering”

The article “Generating transition states of isomerization reactions with deep learning” (https://doi.org/10.1039/D0CP04670A) authored by Lagnajit Pattanaik, John B. Ingraham, Colin A. Grambow and William H. Green was selected as “2020 Hot PCCP Article” by the editors.

Esther Heid has won three prizes for her PhD-thesis:

1. Karl Schloegl Award 2020 of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which is given annually to two awardees for an outstanding doctoral thesis in the field of chemistry.
2. Award of Excellence 2020 by the Federal Ministry of the Republic of Austria for Education, Science and Research, which is given annually for the 40 best dissertations in all fields.
3. Loschmidt Award 2020 by the Chemical-Physical Society Vienna, given annually to an excellent doctoral thesis in the field of chemistry and physics each.

Congratulations!

The article “Temperature-dependent vapour-liquid equilibria and solvation free energy estimation from minimal data” (https://aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aic.16976) by Yunsie Chung, Ryan J. Gillis and William H. Green was the AIChE Journal’s Editor’s Choice paper from the June 2020 issue. The article describes a new strategy to estimate the temperature‐dependent vapor–liquid equilibria and solvation free energies of dilute neutral molecules based on only their estimated solvation energy and enthalpy at 298 K.

Esther Heid has won the Karl Schloegl Award 2020 of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The award is given annually for an outstanding doctoral thesis in the field of chemistry undertaken at an Austrian university. Congratulations!

Oscar Haoyang Wu has won a MolSSI Fellowship. He will be working on developing open-source, self-improving software that automatically predicts the chemical stability and models the radical oxidative degradation kinetics of active pharmaceutical ingredients in the solution. Congratulations!

Lisa Hsieh’s work on battery price projection is mentioned in a Letter published in The Economist (May 23 edition). The study models the practical lower bounds on battery prices set by materials cost and suggests government interventions (subsidies, gas taxes, and mandates) are needed if electric vehicles are to compete with gas-powered ones in the next decade. The original paper can be found here.

Congratulations to Gwen Wilcox for winning the Department’s Outstanding Employee Award!

Two Green group papers published in Intl. J. Chem. Kinet. are among the journal’s top cited papers over the past two years and are made free to access until March on Intl. J. Chem. Kinet. The perspective “Perspective on Mechanism Development and Structure‐Activity Relationships for Gas‐Phase Atmospheric Chemistry” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/kin.21172) contributed by Mark J. Goldman and Prof. William H. Green discusses necessary future mechanism development and research efforts for the sustainable development of chemically detailed mechnisms. The article “An Extended Group Additivity Method for Polycyclic Thermochemistry Estimation” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/kin.21158) contributed by Kehang Han, Adeel Jamal, Colin A. Grambow, Zachary J. Buras and Prof. William H. Green proposes a novel method to estimate polycyclic thermochemistry which significantly improves on group additivity methods. A corresponding web application is available at http://rmg.mit.edu/molecule_search.