Philipp Pracht

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Postdoctoral Fellow
E18-509
Email: ppracht@mit.edu

Philipp Pracht completed his M.S. in Chemistry in and 2017 at the University of Bonn, Germany. Staying at the same University, he pursued a PhD in the group of Prof. Stefan Grimme working on the development and application of semiempirical quantum mechanical tight-binding methods for the exploration of chemical space. He defended his thesis in November 2021 and was honored for his research with the University of Bonn’s Sigrid-Peyerimhoff Prize. For his postdoctoral research, Philipp first moved to RWTH Aachen University conducting research on the efficient calculation of minimum energy crossing points together with Prof. Christoph Bannwarth. In June 2022, he was awarded a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation which enabled him a move to the University of Cambridge to conduct postdoctoral research in the group of Prof. David J. Wales. During his two years in Cambridge, Philipp worked on a variety of projects, including the exploration of solid-state energy landscaped with extended tight-binding methods, protein folding pathways and thermodynamic calculations for metal-organic cages. He joined the Green group as a postdoctoral fellow in July 2024 via a postdoctoral research fellowship by the German academic exchange service (DAAD). While at MIT, Philipp will be researching molecular tautomerism and acidity prediction, using Chemprop and combining semiempirical quantum mechanical calculations with D-MPNN models developed in the Green group.