Neerja Zambare - 2020 Pauling Fellow

Neerja earned her PhD in chemical engineering from Montana State University, conducting research in the Bioprocess Laboratory at the Center for Biofilm Engineering. Under the mentorship of Robin Gerlach and Ellen Lauchnor, her graduate work focused on reactive transport during microbially induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP) and the applications of MICP in environmental remediation such as well-fracture sealing by biomineralization and heavy metal contaminant sequestration by co-precipitation. Her work also explored biomineralization at the single-cell level using droplet-based microfluidics paired with optical and chemical imaging techniques.

At PNNL, Neerja expanded on her microscale biomineralization work in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory under the guidance of Alice Dohnalkova. Neerja studied the underlying cellular-level and biofilm-level processes that support biomineralization through correlative microscopic and microanalytic techniques. She was interested in determining the function of microbes during nucleation of biological precipitates and in developing engineered microenvironments using organics to control the precipitation process. She is now the senior engineer in research and development at Lonza.

Darian Smercina - 2020 Pauling Fellow

Darian earned her PhD in crop and soil sciences from Michigan State University under the mentorship of Lisa Tiemann. Her doctoral research focused on understanding the complex biological and environmental controls on free-living nitrogen fixation in soil systems, a vital biogeochemical process. Darian also has a BS in biology from the University of Toledo.

Under the mentorship of Kirsten Hofmockel, Darian = joined the microbiome science team in the Earth and Biological Sciences Directorate. She pursued soil microbial ecology and biogeochemistry-relevant questions, using novel microfluidic systems and biological nitrogen fixation as a model process to address questions about microbial-scale processes and microbial interactions. Her work contributed broadly to our understanding of environmental microbiology and aims to improve our predictive capacity of soil microbial communities as they relate to global biogeochemical cycles. She is now a senior scientist at Kula Bio. 

Jayde Aufrecht - 2019 Pauling Fellow

Jayde earned her PhD from the University of Tennessee's Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She conducted her doctoral research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the mentorship of Scott Retterer. This work focused on using microfabrication processes to create synthetic habitats for plants and microorganisms to enable dynamic imaging of rhizosphere interactions.

In the Environmental Molecular Sciences Division under the mentorship of Jim Moran, Jayde continued to build synthetic micro-habitats and uses a systems biology approach to understand microbial interactions in the soil. She worked with chemical imaging experts at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory to develop a platform for dynamic spatial sampling of metabolite exchanges between organisms. Her research contributed to our knowledge of terrestrial carbon cycling and could lead to improved sustainable agriculture methods. She is currently a biologist with PNNL.

Mavis Boamah received her PhD in chemistry from Northwestern University under the mentorship of Professor Franz M. Geiger after obtaining a BA degree from Wellesley College with majors in chemistry and mathematics. Her graduate school research focused on understanding reactions occurring at the charged mineral oxide/water interface using nonlinear optics, improving environmental remediation techniques, investigating the nanostructure of metallic films with atom probe tomography, and employing nanodevices to generate renewable energy.

She is a member of the Geochemistry group in the Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate. Here, Mavis is developing a molecularly resolved structural model of an electrical double layer at a ubiquitous and essential metal oxide/aqueous solution interface to improve fundamental understanding of how this structure controls interfacial electron transfer processes that lie at the heart of many environmental chemistry challenges and new energy device problems. She aims to overcome knowledge-limiting obstacles by capitalizing on her unique experience and PNNL's world-class capabilities in nonlinear optical spectroscopies and supporting theory and computation tools. She is currently a chemist with PNNL.

Sam Silva – 2019 Pauling Fellow 
Sam Silva received his PhD in environmental engineering and computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His PhD research largely focused on understanding the chemical composition of the atmosphere as it is influenced by interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Sam also has a BS in physics and an MS in atmospheric science from the University of Arizona. 

Sam worked in the Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division with Susannah Burrows applying data science and artificial intelligence tools to research in atmospheric chemistry and composition. He is particularly interested in using these tools to improve the representation of processes relevant to atmospheric composition in Earth system models. Sam is currently on the faculty of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California.

Sten Lambeets – 2018 Pauling Fellow 
Sten Lambeets earned his PhD from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles under the mentorship of Professor T. Visart de Bocarme and Professor N. Kruse, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research of Belgium. His research investigated the dynamics of the catalytic hydrogenation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) on single rhodium nanoparticles using field emission techniques. With the development of a unique methodology to explore chemical dynamics with atom probe tomography, this work uncovered the existence of an organized mechanism for oxygen atom penetration of the rhodium bulk with rates depending on the crystallographic surface structure.

Sten is now a materials scientist at PNNL. He is pushing the limits of atom probe microcopy (APM) to study surface phenomena in the presence of a very high electric field and the development of the in operando APM dedicated to mapping surface reactions in real-time at the molecular scale.

Matt Kaufman – 2018 Pauling Fellow 
Matt Kaufman received his PhD in geosciences from The University of Texas at Austin, in Professor M. Bayani Cardenas' process hydrology research group. Matt's doctoral work investigated the dynamics of riverbed biogeochemistry from physical, chemical, and microbial perspectives. He applies a broad array of novel and time-tested methods, combining laboratory, field, and numerical modeling to delve deep into the complex and dynamic network of interconnected biogeochemical processes at work in and around rivers.

Matt is now a faculty member of Worcester State University. He previously was an earth scientist at PNNL. He focused on microbially-mediated river corridor redox systems, including designing and building field- and laboratory-based optical dissolved gas sensor systems. He has extensive experience coordinating, leading, and participating in a wide array of field campaigns and building multidisciplinary research teams using an integrated computational simulation, experimentation, and observational approach.

Ismael Rodríguez Pérez – 2018 Pauling Fellow 
Ismael Rodríguez Pérez came from México in 2002 at the age of nine and went to school in the state of Washington. He went on to receive his BS in chemistry from Gonzaga University in 2014 and obtained his PhD in materials chemistry from Oregon State University in 2018 under the mentorship of Professor Xiulei "David" Ji. During his PhD, he focused on performance-driven testing and characterization of battery materials and electrolytes for beyond Li-ion and Li-ion batteries and was also the safety and laboratory manager of his research group. He worked on investigating electrolytes and organic crystalline solids as advanced electrodes for aqueous and non-aqueous dual-ion, Na-ion, K-ion, and Mg-ion batteries for energy storage applications. Furthermore, he investigated potential synthesis and characterization of organic crystals to fine-tune their electrochemical properties.

While he was at PNNL, he was a former member of the Stationary Energy Storage team within the Battery Materials and Systems group in the Energy and Environment Directorate working in research for grid-level applications. He focused specifically toward dual-ion batteries (DIBs), water-in-(bi)salt electrolytes, and Gel electrolytes, where he looked into using low-cost, renewable, and scalable materials for high-voltage aqueous batteries. Ismael engages in optimizing electrolytes to discover the potential of aqueous DIBs. He later took a position with silanano in the battery industry. He is currently with Blue Current.

Gian Surbella – 2017 Pauling Fellow
Gian Surbella received his PhD from The George Washington University under the mentorship of Professor Christopher L. Cahill. Gian's dissertation broadly encompassed the synthesis and structural characterization of supramolecular actinide-containing hybrid materials. In short, these materials consist of discrete inorganic and organic building units that are assembled via non-covalent interactions such as hydrogen and halogen bonds. Beyond the synthesis of these materials, his efforts were geared toward rationalizing crystallographically observed structural trends and quantifying interaction strengths with an aim to relate the combined influences thereof to changes in material properties, e.g., luminescence and thermochromism.

Gian is now a chemist working in nuclear and radiochemistry at PNNL.

Elias Nakouzi – 2017 Pauling Fellow
Elias Nakouzi earned his PhD in physical chemistry from Florida State University where he worked under the mentorship of Professor Oliver Steinbock. His research focused on biomimetic crystallization and self-assembly of materials across scales, particularly for the case of silica-carbonate biomorphs. Previously, Elias received a MSc in physical chemistry from the American University of Beirut and a BSc in chemistry from Notre Dame University-Louaize, Lebanon.

Elias is now a materials scientist at PNNL. Every day is the best day of his life.

Hansi Singh – 2016 Pauling Fellow
Hansi Singh is now a faculty member at the University of Victoria. Hansi received her PhD from the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences with an MS in applied mathematics, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Her graduate research focused on how energy and moisture transport in the climate system govern the mean state and perturbation response over a range of temporal and spatial scales.

In the Earth and Biological Sciences Directorate, with the mentorship of Phil Rasch and Ruby Leung in the Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division, Hansi focused on understanding how high-latitude climates respond to system perturbations. Her emphasis was on coupled atmosphere–ocean–ice dynamics in the polar regions and the role of meridional energy transports.

Bo Peng – 2016 Pauling Fellow
Bo Peng earned his PhD in physical/theoretical chemistry from the University of Washington. His doctoral research was supervised by Professor Xiaosong Li and focused on developing efficient algorithms for several advanced electronic structure theory models ranging from the popular density functional theory and time-dependent density functional theory to more sophisticated post-Hartree–Fock models. He also worked on applying these models to accurately describe the excited states and the associated dynamics in some energy and environment-related processes.

At PNNL, he joined the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory as part of the Molecular Science Computing performance software group. For his fellowship, Bo worked with Karol Kowalski to develop efficient wave-function-based computational schemes for accurately computing ground and excited state wave functions of large systems. This will bring the routine application and accuracy of high-level quantum calculations into many regimes that previously could only be accessed by low-level calculations.

Kelsey Stoerzinger – 2016 Pauling Fellow
Kelsey Stoerzinger received her PhD in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Her dissertation built an understanding of the catalytic activity of oxides through their electronic structure and surface chemistry. Earlier, Kelsey received an M.Phil. in physics from the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar and a BS in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University.

Kelsey is now a member of the faculty of the Department of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University.

Rene Boiteau – 2016 Pauling Fellow
Rene Boiteau received his PhD in chemical oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology–Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program. His research focused on the development of chromatography–mass spectrometry methods for characterizing organic chelating agents in natural seawater. This work led to the identification of microbially produced metal binding compounds in the ocean, including siderophores, and revealed how microbes use distinct iron acquisition strategies across different nutrient regimes.

Rene is now a member of the faculty of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

Garrett Goh – 2015 Pauling Fellow
Garrett Goh graduated from the University of Michigan with a PhD in chemistry, where his doctoral research was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellowship. At Michigan, he worked with Dr. Charles L. Brooks III on developing a next-generation explicit solvent constant pH molecular dynamics capability for the CHARMM molecular dynamics program. His work modeling pH effects in molecular simulations led to the discovery of pH-regulated transient conformational states and how they control the properties of pH-sensitive fluorescent proteins and the mechanism of RNA catalysis.

Garrett is now a Machine Learning Applied Science Engineering Manager at Microsoft, Xbox.

Kathe Todd-Brown – 2015 Pauling Fellow
Kathe Todd-Brown received her PhD in Earth system science from the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation examined the representation of soil carbon in Earth system models used to inform the IPCC report. Previously, she worked at Massachusetts General Hospital in bioinformatics and obtained her BS in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College.

Kathe is now a faculty member in the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences at the University of Florida.

Luis Estevez – 2014 Pauling Fellow
Luis Estevez received his BS in mechanical engineering at the University of Maine at Orono in 2007, graduating magna cum laude. A summer internship working under Dr. Anthony Puckett at the Los Alamos Dynamics Summer Session (2006) inspired Luis to realize his full potential by pursuing a PhD in materials science and engineering at Cornell University. At Cornell, Luis worked under the mentorship of Dr. Emmanuel Giannelis on projects spanning polymer-based nanocomposite actuators, macroporous PEM fuel cell electrodes, and eventually high surface area porous carbon materials for energy storage devices such as Li-S battery and supercapacitor applications. Luis is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi, Pi Mu Epsilon, and Pi Tau Sigma Honor Societies and is a member of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. While at Cornell, he was awarded a Sloan Fellowship, a GK-12 Fellowship, and the 2011 Zellman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Graduate Student Award.

He is currently working at the University of Dayton Research Institute while he attempts to transition his technology from the lab into the commercial space. To that effort he has founded his company, Advanced & Innovative Multifunctional Materials (AIMM), LLC.

Jeff Katalenich – 2014 Pauling Fellow
Jeff Katalenich earned a PhD in nuclear engineering and radiological sciences from the University of Michigan while researching the production of cerium oxide sol-gel microspheres as a dust-free nuclear fuel fabrication technique. His PhD research was supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Center for Space Nuclear Research, and the University of Michigan's Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences. Earlier, Jeff received a BS in mechanical engineering from Michigan Technological University where he managed a student satellite project for two years.

Jeff Katalenich is a staff research scientist and engineer at PNNL. His interests and experiences are broad but focus primarily on national security, material processing, and space nuclear power. In 2021, Jeff received PNNL’s Ronald Brodzinski Award for Early Career Exceptional Achievement based on his sol-gel research.

Hans Bernstein – 2013 Pauling Fellow
Hans Bernstein is an associate professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Hans received his PhD and BS in chemical and biological engineering from Montana State University. His PhD work was supported through the National Science Foundation's Integrative Graduate Educational and Research Traineeship (IGERT-fellowship) in geobiological systems. Hans' research focuses on both applied and fundamental chemical reaction kinetics and transport in biofilms and microbial communities.

In the National Security Directorate, Hans worked under the mentorship of Helen Kreuzer on a project that aimed to identify controllable, cooperative ecological phenomena employed by phototrophically driven microbial communities for conceptualizing and engineering multispecies biocatalytic platforms.

Ryan Comes – 2013 Pauling Fellow
Ryan Comes received his PhD in engineering physics from the University of Virginia in 2013. Before that, he received a BS in physics and a BS in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. His doctoral research focused on the directed self-assembly of epitaxial complex oxide thin films and was supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

At PNNL, his research focused on epitaxial oxide films grown via oxide molecular beam epitaxy under the mentorship of Scott Chambers in the Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.

Patrick El Khoury – 2013 Pauling Fellow
Patrick El Khoury received a BS in chemistry from the American University of Beirut in 2006, a PhD in photochemical sciences from Bowling Green State University in 2010, and postdoctoral training at the University of California, Irvine. Patrick won the 2017 Ronald L. Brodzinski Early Career Exceptional Achievement Award for his work in advancing ultrasensitive molecular spectroscopy and nanoscale chemical imaging.

Currently, Patrick is a senior research scientist in the Chemical Physics and Analysis group, within the Physical Sciences Division at PNNL. Among other things, he spends his days worrying about molecules, plasmons, and their interactions as gauged through tip-enhanced Raman nanospectroscopy and nanoimaging.

Ryan Renslow – 2012 Pauling Fellow
Ryan Renslow is the Director of Cheminformatics and Computational Chemistry and an associate research professor at Washington State University. 

At PNNL, his research focused on the identification of novel metabolites in complex samples, the relationship between microbial community structure and function, and the emergence of higher order properties in multispecies communities. To achieve this, he used a suite of computational and mathematical tools, as well as advanced imaging techniques. Applications of his work intersected human health, energy production, ecology, national defense, machine vision, and biotechnology research areas.

Brian Miller – 2012 Pauling Fellow
Brian Miller is a clinical physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Banner University Medical Center, Tucson and an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Imaging at the University of Arizona. Brian received his PhD in optical sciences from the University of Arizona in 2011. In 2008, he received the University of Arizona Student Innovator of the Year Award for his work on the development of a high-resolution, CCD/CMOS-based gamma-ray detector for pre-clinical medical imaging applications.

While at PNNL, Brian's research areas focused on the continued development of high-spatial-resolution ionizing radiation detectors. In particular, he is investigating gas electron multipliers and their potential for neutron detection and imaging applications.

Priyanka Bhattacharya – 2012 Pauling Fellow
Priyanka Bhattacharya received her PhD in physics from Clemson University and an MS in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, India. She was the recipient of the 2012 Clemson University Board of Trustees and the College of Engineering and Science Outstanding Graduate Researcher awards. She was awarded the 2011 Sigma Xi Grants-in-Aid-of-Research fellowship to conduct research with Professor Paul Dubin in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Priyanka also received a Center for Optical Materials Science and Engineering Technologies Graduate Fellowship at Clemson University to complete a part of her PhD dissertation under the supervision of Professor Pu Chun Ke in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Priyanka worked with Jiguang (Jason) Zhang and Dr. Daniel Gaspar in the Applied Materials Sciences Division within the Energy and Environment Directorate. Her research focused on improving the performance of Li-air and Li-S batteries by developing a fundamental understanding of the electrochemistry of battery materials that affect battery realization at the commercial scale. To achieve this goal, Priyanka developed new hybrid electrode materials consisting of both soft and condensed nanomaterials that can efficiently increase the capacity and improve the cycling capability of batteries beyond Li-ion. The ultimate goal of her research was to tackle the fundamental operational challenges that are hindering the growth and commercialization of energy storage devices for high-energy-density applications. After working as a battery engineer at Tesla, Priyanka moved to Blue Current, Inc. as a senior manager for Battery R&D.

James Stegen – 2011 Pauling Fellow
James Stegen received his PhD from the University of Arizona in ecology and evolutionary biology in 2009. James is a member of the Earth and Biological Sciences Directorate's Biological Sciences Division. His research area focuses on developing ecological models of microbial communities. In particular, he is leveraging multiple economics technologies to describe whole community function through time and space.

This data will be used to develop process-based simulation models for predicting the effects of remediation strategies and environmental change on key ecosystem functions, such as subsurface contaminant transport. James was awarded a 2019 DOE Early Career Award.

Andreas Vasdekis – 2011 Pauling Fellow
Andreas Vasdekis is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Idaho. Andreas received his PhD from the University of St. Andrews (UK) exploring the photophysics and applications of conjugated polymers (2008). After a short spell at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), he became a junior scientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL; Switzerland) for three years before moving to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

His research interests generally lie at the interface of photonics, biophysics, and materials. At PNNL, as a member of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, he investigated processes and interactions associated with biofuel synthesis by developing and applying precision biological measurement techniques in microfluidics.

Hui Wan – 2011 Pauling Fellow
Hui Wan received her PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2009. Her PhD work was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, on developing numerical methods for the next generation of weather forecast and climate models. As a PhD candidate, she also attended the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modeling. Hui has over half a dozen peer-reviewed papers and other publications accomplished. She was awarded the 2009 Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society and the 2009 Wladimir Peter Koppen Prize for Climate and Earth System Research from the University of Hamburg.

Hui's research focuses on understanding process interactions in the atmosphere and decreasing the uncertainty associated with component coupling in the global climate.

Susan Wiedner – 2010 Pauling Fellow
Susan Wiedner received her PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of Michigan Department of Chemistry. She is a past recipient of a two-year, NIH-funded Chemical-Biology Interface Training grant.

Susan's research focus is on developing and integrating a subcellular chemical proteomics platform using activity-based probes and subcellular fractionation to facilitate the analysis of enzyme activity to promote the field of proteomics. This technology could lead to a better understanding of systems biology on the cellular level.

Marcel Baer – 2010 Pauling Fellow
Marcel Baer is working to further develop our understanding of the important molecular interactions that give rise to novel phenomena in the vicinity of hydrophobic interfaces. His focus is on utilizing and developing less computationally intensive models that contain quantum mechanics and thus can describe chemistry. The ultimate goal is to develop a systematic approach to understanding the novel chemistry of interfaces, including heterogeneous catalysts. Marcel was awarded a 2021 Early Career Award.

Grant Johnson – 2009 Pauling Fellow
Grant Johnson is a scientist in PNNL's Physical and Computational Science Directorate. His research is focused within the Separations, Detection, and Analysis program with Laboratory Fellow Julia Laskin.

Grant is developing unique capabilities for the controlled preparation and characterization of alloy nanoparticles (NPs) and clusters of precise composition. His research is employing oxygen reduction as a model reaction to investigate how the size, shape, elemental composition, and support interaction of alloy NPs and clusters on surfaces influence their catalytic behavior. Utilizing these capabilities and fundamental insights into structure–reactivity relationships will allow the directed design of improved alloy NPs and clusters for a broad range of applications in catalysis and energy storage.

Xiao Lin – 2009 Pauling Fellow
Xiao Lin is now a professor within the School of Physics at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.