Friday, October 4, 2024
Dr. Kimberly J. Daas has recently joined the UCI Chemistry Department as a Dr. Feizal Waffarn Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and she will be staying with us for the next two years. She will work with Professor Kieron Burke on enhancing density functional theory using modern methods, especially furthering our understanding of semiclassics and ensemble DFT. She recently defended her PhD thesis at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she worked in the group of Professor Paola Gori-Giorgi. In her dissertation she not only built the theoretical foundation for a new method to obtain the exact correlation energies, which is the only piece in the energy missed by Hartree-Fock theory, but she also derived highly accurate functionals for non-covalent interactions at the same cost as dispersion corrected hybrids. During her Dr. Feizal Waffarn Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr. Daas will also try to help early-career LGBTQ+ and especially trans students and researchers navigate the obstacles they face in academia.