ChemE NEWS CHEMICAL & PETROLEUM ENGINEERING
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Mpourmpakis Receives Bodossaki Award
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his summer, Dr. Giannis Mpourmpakis won the Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award in Chemistry and was honored at a ceremony in Athens by Prokopis Pavlopoulos, president of Greece. The Distinguished Young Scientists Award honors the most outstanding scientists of Greek descent under the age of 40 and is given once every two years. The award takes into consideration the individual’s achievements in their field, their contribution to the cultural, scientific and
economic development of Greece, and their contribution to the international promotion of Greece through their work and ethics. Dr. Mpourmpakis was nominated by Steven R. Little, PhD, chair of the chemical and petroleum engineering department, and Sunil Saxena, PhD, chair of the chemistry department. “After careful deliberation on the ten excellent nominations received, the selection committee, consisting of distinguished scientists of Greek origin working in the field of chemistry all around the globe, unanimously recommended Dr. Giannis Mpourmpakis for the 2019 Bodossaki Young Scientist award in Chemistry,” said Professor Theodoros Theodorou, Associate Vice President of the Board of Trustees of the Bodossaki Foundation. “The committee appreciated Dr. Mpourmpakis’s creative use of state-of-the-art multiscale modeling and simulation methods to understand and predict the properties of materials systems ranging from colloidal metallic nanoparticles to kidney stones. Dr. Mpourmpakis’s work can guide experimental efforts towards the development of new, efficient, and environmentally friendly materials and processes.”
Modeling a Model Nanoparticle
Mpourmpakis Group Creates First Universal Computer Model for Metal Nanoparticle Adsorption
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etal nanoparticles have a wide range of applications, from medicine to catalysis, from energy to the environment. But the fundamentals of adsorption – the process allowing molecules to bind as a layer to a solid surface – in relation to the nanoparticle’s characteristics were yet to be discovered. This new research introduces the first universal adsorption model that accounts for detailed nanoparticle structural characteristics, metal composition and different adsorbates, making it possible to predict adsorption behavior on any metal nanoparticles and screen their stability. The study combines computational chemistry modeling with machine learning to fit large continued on page 2