Members
hjkulik @ mit.edu (  C.V.)
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Heather Kulik Associate Professor, joined 2013 Heather J. Kulik is an Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering at MIT. She received her B.E. in Chemical Engineering from Cooper Union in 2004 and her Ph.D. from Materials Science and Engineering at MIT in the group of Nicola Marzari in 2009. She completed postdocs in the group of Felice Lightstone at Lawrence Livermore (2010) and Todd J. Martı́nez at Stanford (2010−2013), prior to joining MIT as a faculty member in November 2013. Her work has been recognized by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface (2012-2017), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2018), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2018), AAAS Marion Milligan Mason Award (2019-2020), NSF CAREER Award (2019), the Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research “Class of Influential Researchers”, the ACS COMP Division OpenEye Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty in Computational Chemistry, the JPCB Lectureship (ACS PHYS), the DARPA Director's Fellowship (2020), and a Sloan Fellowship (2021). |
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yaelc @ MIT.edu |
Yael Cytter Postdoctoral Scholar, joined 2020 Yael joined the group as a postdoc in February 2020. She received her Ph.D. at Hebrew University of Jerusalem with Prof. Roi Baer. Her dissertation was focused on a stochastic approach to thermal density functional theory within the warm dense matter regime. In the Kulik group, she is working on the interface of electronic structure method development with machine learning methods. |
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mliu19 @ MIT.edu ( C.V.)
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Mingjie Liu Postdoctoral Scholar, joined 2020 Mingjie is a postdoc starting March 1st, 2020. She got her PhD from Rice University with Prof. Boris Yakobson. Before she joins Kulik's group, she worked as a research associate in the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Her research interests include low-dimensional materials, single-atom catalysts design and machine learning. |
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anazemi AT mit DOT edu ( C.V.)
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Azadeh Nazemi Postdoctoral Scholar, joined 2020 Azadeh completed her Ph.D. in the Cundari group at the University of North Texas in 2020. During her Ph.D she engaged in projects in two different areas. One in the field of drug discovery and ligand-protein interactions in collaboration with Reata Pharmaceuticals. The second is modeling of transition metal-based catalysts for the activation of small molecules including light alkanes. Her focus in the Kulik group is on the design of biomimetic catalysts for energy conversion applications. |
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mgt16 [at] mit.edu ( C.V.)
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Michael Taylor Postdoctoral Scholar, joined 2019 Michael Taylor joined the group in August 2019 as a postdoctoral researcher. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2013, and recently earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh under the guidance of Prof. Giannis Mpourmpakis with the support of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. His dissertation focused on understanding stability of atomically-precise metal nanoclusters and tailoring their structure towards targeted applications. In the Kulik group, he will work on III-V quantum dots and metal organic framework electronic properties. |
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hadamji @ mit.edu |
Husain Adamji Graduate Student, joined 2020 Husain grew up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tufts University in May 2020. As an undergraduate, Husain performed research in Professor Prashant Deshlahra’s group where he studied structure-property relations in next-generation Group III-V semiconductors like GaAsBi using Density Functional Theory (DFT). Following this project, Husain also worked with Professor Deshlahra on the selective oxidative dehydrogenation of propane using nitric oxide as a homogeneous gas-phase catalyst. Husain joined the Kulik group in November 2020 as a Chemical Engineering PhD student and is co-advised by Professor Yuriy Roman. His research focuses on novel inorganic porous catalyst design inspired by biological enzymes. |
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narunach [at] mit [dot] edu |
Naveen Arunachalam Graduate Student, joined 2018 Naveen joined the Kulik group in December 2018 as a PhD student in Chemical Engineering. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Caltech in Spring 2018. At Caltech, he worked with Prof. Thomas Miller on ion diffusion in polymers and with Prof. William Goddard on olfactory protein structure determination. Currently, Naveen’s research is focused on using machine learning and experimental databases to inform inorganic catalyst discovery. Naveen holds an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. |
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akash9 at MIT dot EDU |
Akash Bajaj Graduate Student, joined 2016 Akash is from Kanpur, India, and he completed his Bachelors in Materials Science and Engineering from IIT-Kanpur in Spring 2016. At IIT-Kanpur, Akash worked with Prof. Somnath Bhowmick, majorly, on utilizing genetic algorithms for predicting novel two-dimensional polymorphs of Phosphorene and Arsenene. Akash is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Materials Science & Engineering at MIT. Akash joined the Kulik group in Fall 2016. Currently, Akash's research is focused upon developing techniques to overcome both, delocalization error and static correlation error, in exchange correlation approximations in DFT. |
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dbkchu AT mit.edu |
Daniel B.K. Chu Graduate Student, joined 2019 Daniel joined the group in December 2019 as a Ph.D. student in chemical engineering. His research will focus on density-based approaches to improving approximate DFT. |
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crduan at MIT dot edu ( C.V.)
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Chenru Duan Graduate Student, joined 2017 Chenru joined the Kulik group in November 2017 as a PhD student in Chemistry. He received his B.S. in the Physics Department, Zhejiang University, China in fall 2017. He is now focusing on inorganic catalysts design with machine learning techniques. Assuming one can build a good surrogate model with thousands of training data (proved to be true by works in our and other groups), he focuses on faster and more accurate data generation with first-principles method by building an automated and multi-fidelity job control system. Back in his undergraduate study, he worked on the dynamics of open quantum systems, heat transport and quantum phase transition of model systems. |
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harperd @ MIT.edu |
Daniel Harper Graduate Student, joined 2018 Daniel received a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Physics from Point Loma Nazarene University in 2018. During his time there, he worked on small molecule molecule drug discovery in a medicinal chemistry group. Daniel joined the Kulik group in November 2018, working in the automated molecular design and discovery subgroup. |
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haojun@mit.edu ( C.V.)
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Haojun Jia Graduate Student, joined 2019 Haojun joined the Kulik group in November 2019 as a Ph.D. student in Physical Chemistry. He obtained his B.S. in Physics from Jilin University and National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (dual bachelors in both China and Russia) in 2019. Looking back to his undergraduate research, he worked on designing 2D piezoelectric materials, phase transition sequence under high pressure, surface science and gas phase chemistry. He is now working on spin-state dependent properties of single atom catalysts. |
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kastner at mit dot edu ( CV.pdf)
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David Kastner Graduate Student, joined 2021 David is a graduate student in bioengineering jointly advised in the Kulik and Tidor labs. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a B.S. in biophysics and worked in an organic chemistry lab under the supervision of Dr. Steven Castle studying non-standard amino acids. David completed separate internships with Dr. Haribabu Arthanari at Dana-Farber on NMR and protein composition, and Dr. Nico Tjandra at the NIH studying protein-peptide interactions. After completing his bachelors, David worked as a cancer biologist at the Huntsman Cancer Institute studying network motifs in small-cell lung cancer with Dr. Trudy Oliver. His current research at MIT will focus on better understanding high-valent iron enzymes. David is an NSF fellow. |
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rimsha at MIT dot EDU |
Rimsha Mehmood Graduate Student, joined 2016 Rimsha graduated from the School of Science and Engineering, LUMS, Pakistan with a B.S in Chemistry. During her undergraduate degree, she worked under the supervision of Prof.Irshad Hussain on the production of functionalized Manganese Oxide nanoparticles for bacteria detection in drinking water. After graduation from LUMS, Rimsha joined MIT as a Chemistry graduate student in Fall 2016 and subsequently the Kulik group in Spring 2017. Currently, her research focuses on using computational chemistry tools to explore the role of substrate positioning in the reactivity outcomes of multi-protein biosynthetic assemblies. |
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nandy AT mit DOT edu |
Aditya Nandy Graduate Student, joined 2017 Aditya joined the Kulik group in November 2017 as a PhD student in Chemistry. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley in Spring 2017. At Cal, Aditya worked with Prof. Jeffrey A. Reimer, using solid-state NMR and other methods to study diffusion and adsorption of small molecules inside of MOF materials. Aditya holds an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. |
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gterrone at MIT dot edu |
Gianmarco Terrones Graduate Student, joined 2020 Gianmarco joined the Kulik group in December 2020 as a PhD student in Chemical Engineering. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Caltech in June 2020. At Caltech, he worked in the Lewis group on bubble positioning in devices for solar fuel production and in the Callies group on a parallelized model for ocean dynamics. In the Kulik group, Gianmarco’s research concerns multi-objective earth abundant materials design. |
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vyshnavi @ MIT.edu |
Vyshnavi Vennelakanti Graduate Student, joined 2018 Vyshnavi has obtained the Master of Science degree in Chemistry from National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar, India, in June 2018. During her time at NISER, she worked in the field of NMR Method Development under the guidance of Prof. Arindam Ghosh on the project "Recovery of Signals Close to Solvent Resonance in Aqueous Solutions of Biomolecules" . Vyshnavi is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. Vyshnavi joined the Kulik group in November 2018 and her research focus in the group is to understand how non covalent interactions mediate reaction selectivity in metalloenzymes by studying these systems with electronic structure methods. |