11/11/2024: Congratulations to Anthony Casale, whose manuscript “Assessing the K2BO3 family of materials as multiferroics” was accepted to Physical Review Materials!
11/4/2024: Congratulations to Peng Yan for passing his candidacy defense and participating in the UMBC ceremony on Friday, November 1st, 2024!
8/7/2024: The Baltimore SCIART teams presented their summer projects on computational sensor development (Caitlin Doherty and Olivia Chiarini) and the degradation of inorganic pigments (Anna Darden, Lexi Wise, Rowena)
7/16/2024: Group alumnus Rachel Rehling has taken an offer to work at Batelle National Defense Institute through NBACC. Congrats, Rachel!
6/28/2024: Mona, Anthony, and Peng: Have fun at your Espresso workshop at Boise State!
6/10/2024: Dr. Bennett attended CURE Assessment Workshop at Ursinus College, hosted by Rebecca Roberts and the BASIL team
6/6/2024: The Baltimore SCIART Summer Program begins today!
5/23/2024: Congratulations to our graduating group members Rayal Smith, Mei Liu, Amalthea Trobare, and Caitlin Doherty.
4/10/2024: Congrats to Rayal Smith and Mei Liu, and SCIART alum Lillian Kidd, all here at URCAD 2024!
3/7/2024: Congratulations to Aria Tauraso for receiving the ACS Physical Chemistry award this year!
3/1/2024: Mona Layegh, Peng Yan, and Anthony Casale presented their work during our Graduate Research Day events, hostd by the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UMBC. Thank you for letting everyone know the great work you’ve been doing!
1/11/2024: Our review of DFT and Thermodynamics has been published! Congratulations to Mona Layegh and Peng Yan on this massive accomplishment! This is also Peng’s first published paper: Link to Review
12/4/2023: Congratulations to Peng Yan, who passed his PhD candidacy exam!
11/20/2023: Bennett group alumnus Josh Leginze will be heading to Korea to teach English and STEM courses with the Milestone Institute. Congratulations, Josh!
10/18/2023: Congratulations to Aria Tauraso and Amalthea Trobare for the acceptance of your paper to Surface Science! “The Effects of Chlorine-Containing Species on Cinnabar: A Density Functional Theory Investigation into the Surface Adsorption Reactivity of Mercury Sulfide” was performed during the 2022 session of the Baltimore SCIART program. Link to Paper
10/9/2023: Congratulations to Anthony Casale, who passed his PhD candidacy exam! Pictured below is Naba Das, Lahari Saha, Anthony Casale, Kayry Segarra, and Leopoldo Posada-Escobar (l-r) at the Doctoral Candidates Recognition Ceremony.
9/7/2023: Welcome Mei Liu to the group! Mei’s undergraduate research project will be on developing electronic band structure tutorials with Mona.
8/28/2023: A warm welcome to undergraduate researchers Rachal Rehling and Caitlin Doherty, who will continue their calcite surface analyses as members of the research group.
8/21/2023: Congrats to Anthony Casale who received an AEOP fellowship for 2023-2024 to work with researchers at DEVCOM
8/9/2023: Congratulations on a successful poster session at SURF! Rayal Smith, Joshua Birenzvige, Rachal Rehling, Caitlin Doherty, and Jeanne Ngo had some amazing posters. Rachal gave a great talk to open the day!
8/8/2023: Congratulations to Aria Tauraso for being named a CNMS Scholar! The CNMS Scholars Program at UMBC is a selective undergraduate initiative designed to support talented individuals interested in the advancement of women students in the sciences.
6/7/2023: The Summer Baltimore SCIART program begins today!
6/1/2023: Congratulations to Aria Tauraso being named our newest Merck Data Science fellow!
5/26/2023: Happy Graduation Day, Josh Birenzvige! Josh will take part in the Baltimore SCIART program this summer.
5/9/2023: Dr. Bennett was invited to Coppin State University to talk about materials discovery at the
Science and Technology Center
5/3/2023: Dr. Bennett was invited to UM College Park MSE to talk about designing new functional materials
4/26/2023: Congratulations, Dr. Jessica Heimann! Our collaborative work with Dr. Celia Chari and Prof. Kathy Faber at CalTech Faber Group was accepted to Langmuir!
Click here for the paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.langmuir.3c00113
4/12/2023: Amalthea, Aria, and Josh all presented today at URCAD! Way to go, undergrad research team!
4/5/2023: Congratulations, Dr. Jessica Heimann on your article, “Understanding the Effects of Amine and Morpholine Adsorption on Unglazed Earthenware Using Density Functional Theory” being accepted to the Journal of Cultural Heritage! Link to Paper
3/31/2023: Amalthea Trobare has received the ACS’s Physical Chemist Award for 2023. Congratulations, Amalthea!
3/27/2023: Congratulations to Bennett group alumni Aaliyah Khan (BS Chemistry, 2022) on being awarded an NSF GRFP for first-principles DFT studies at UPenn!
3/3/2023: First Group Meeting of 2023!
L to R: Aria Tauraso, Amalthea Trobare, Owen Sparr, Lila Marino, Anthony Casale, Mona Layegh, Peng Yan, Joshua Birenzvige
1/23/2023: Amalthea starts her internship at NASA Langley! Way to go, Amalthea!
1/17/2023: A warm welcome to our newest undergraduate researcher Josh Birenzvige!
1/13/2023: Our exfoliation study has been accepted for publication at J. Phys. Chem. C. Congratulations, Mona, on your first author paper! Link to manuscript
12/15/2022: Congratulations to Amalthea for her new position at the NASA Langley Research Center! She will be starting this spring as a materials science research intern. Her project is focusing on investigating novel perovskite materials for use as high dielectric capacitors within spacecrafts
11/30/2022: Congrats to Mona Layegh for presenting our work on green routes of chemical exfoliation at the 2022 Fall MRS conference
11/10/2022: Congrats to Lilly Kidd, who presented our work on HgS surface degradation at ABRCMS 2022!
9/20/2022: We made the cover of Surface Science! Here’s the low-fi version for now. Congratulations to former undergraduate researcher Ryan Grimes (now at UVA MSE).
9/19/2022: Dr. Bennett had a great visit at Millersville University! Melissa Mullen Davis was an amazing host! The students seemed to enjoy “DFT as a noninvasive probe for art conservation science.”
8/10/2022: It’s the last day of SCIART! The students talk is hosted online for SURF 2022: here for link
8/6/2022: Congrats to former undergraduate Ryan Grimes on “Surface Transformation Thermodynamics of Alkaline Earth Carbonates using First-Principles Calculations” being accepted to Surface Science!
8/3/2022: Congrats on our collaborative work with the Jaramillo group at MIT (https://jaramillo.mit.edu/) being published at Physical Review Letters. This study highlights the importance of theory and experiment working in tandem AND was spotlighted in Physics as an Editors Suggestion. Paper link and Spotlight link
7/14/2022: Congrats to Dr. Jessica Heimann and Blair Montgomery High student Stanley Ou on having your work published in Clays and Clay Minerals! Click on the paper link for more information.
5/11/2022: Congratulations to Lila Marino and Eunice Costanzo for their selection as Merck fellows for their work titled “Data sciences in the life sciences”.
5/6/2022: Congratulations to graduating seniors Aaliyah Khan, who received the ACS Chesapeake Award, and Jasper Tucker, who received the Vitullo Research Award at today’s ceremony. We took way too many pictures!
4/18/2022: Virtual URCAD is up and running! Go check out Aaliyah Khan’s talk on discovering new functional materials: https://umbc.voicethread.com/myvoice/thread/19813652
4/12/2022: Our work has been featured in the “Out in Inorganic” virtual issue of Inorganic Chemistry…twice! https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.inorgchem.2c00729 The first article is our Pb release study (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.inorgchem.0c03398) and the second article is teaching Aufbau using pseudopotential generators (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c00700)!
4/11/2022: Dr. Bennett traveled to DeSales University to talk about DFT and Art Conservation, and the Baltimore SCIART program. Thank you for the invitation, Profs. Sara Hayik and Julie Himmelberger! https://www.lvacs.org/meetings-and-events
3/20/2022: The group has 6 talks at the virtual ACS meeting this spring! Go, team!
3/15/2022: Welcome to our new graduate student, Peng Yan. Peng is bringing his expertise in surface science to the group.
3/8/2022: Our work in the Baltimore SCIART program is out now: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.1c23695, if you want to learn more about the work our students did last summer in collaboration with the Walters Art Museum. A special thank you to Dr. Jessica Heimann and Prof. Zeev Rosenzweig for making this possible. We’re always looking for new ways to use DFT methods.
2/22/2022: Conratulations to Dr. Jessica Heimann, Jasper Tucker, and the SCIART 2021 students. Our work on DFT as a non destructive surface probe in art conservation science was accepted to ACS Appl. Mater. Inter.
2/14/2022: Welcome to new undergraduate researchers Lila Marino, Eunice Costanzo, and Andrew Bumgardner! Your expertise in python and Unix will be put to good use.
2/11/2022: Congratulations to Anthony Casale for passing his literature review!
1/26/2022: Congratulations to co-PI Jessica Heimann: our NSF-XSEDE Education Allocation for the summer SCIART program was approved! This means we have 50,000 SU for the summer on one of the fastest computers in the US!
12/4/2021: Aaliyah delivered a talk on our work on functional materials at the LSAMP conference this weekend. Congratulations, Aaliyah!
10/29/2021: Congratulations Aaliyah, Autumn, and Josh on the publication of our functional materials work! This issue of the Journal of Materials Research spotlights early career faculty JMR Early Career Spotlight and usually attracts a lot of positive attention!
9/30/2021: Kaylor Stroot, who participated in the SCIART Summer Session 1 of 2021, will be interning at the Lunder Conservation Center starting January 2022. The Lunder Conservation Center is a part of the Smithsonian in DC at the National Portrait Gallery. Congratulations, Kaylor! Link to the Lunder Conservation Center
9/27/2021: Mona Layegh has passed her candidacy exam and is an official PhD candidate. Congratulations, Mona!
9/8/2021: Aaliyah Khan has been selected to be a University System of Maryland’s Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation 2021 Fall Research Fellow. Congrats, Aaliyah!
Read more about LSAMP here
9/2/2021: Congratulations, Jessica! Our work on the SCIART program was published by the Journal of Chemical Education. Link to J. Chem. Ed. paper
8/31/2021: A warm welcome to Jasper Tucker who joined the group after participating in SCIART this summer.
8/3/2021: Congrats to the Baltimore SCIART Summer Session 2!
View their poster presentation on Small Molecule Adsorption to Aragonite Surfaces here: SCIART Poster Summer II
7/2/2021: Congrats to the Baltimore SCIART Summer Session 1!
View their poster presentation on Small Molecule Adsorption to Aragonite Surfaces here: SCIART Poster Summer I
6/30/21: Welcome Stanley Ou, a high school student from the Montgomery Blair Science Magnet Program
6/9/21: Autumn’s advocacy work and commitment to scholarship at UMBC was highlighted by UIUC: Getting to Know Autumn Cook
Congratulations to our 2021 UMBC Chemistry & Biochemistry graduates! Autumn Cook is heading to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Ryan Grimes is headed to the Materials Informatics Group at the University of Virginia, and Josh Leginze is headed to Solvay.
5/18/2021: Congrats, Autumn! Your important advocacy work was highlighted here UMBC News including being named LQBTQ+ Scholar of the Year in 2021.
4/12/2021: Our manuscript on kaolinite surface adsorbates has been published in Applied Clay Science! Congratulations Jessica and Ryan. Link to Appl. Clay. Sci. paper
4/9/2021: Congratulations to everyone who’s won a UMBC Dept of Chemistry & Biochemistry Award! Aaliyah won the UMBC Dept of Chemistry and Biochemistry Satterfield award, Autumn was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and won the UMBC Dept of Chemistry Mittino Award for Service, and Ryan won the UMBC Dept of Chemistry & Biochemistry Victor Vitullo Award for Research.
4/8/2021: Congratulations, Aaliyah on winning an ACS Computers in Chemistry Award for your presentation
4/1/2021: Congratulations, Aaliyah on being selected to participate in the REU Program at UPenn’s LRSM this summer!
2/3/2021: Congratulations, Aaliyah on being selected to participate in the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program this semester. For more information on the program, Click here to learn more about LSAMP
1/6/2021: Our manuscript on surface thermodynamics of lead oxides and carbonates has been published in Inorganic Chemistry!
Link to Inorg. Chem. paper
1/4/2021: The SCIART program begins today! We’re excited for the opportunity to link theory and art conservation.
Link to SCIART at UMBC
1/4/2021: Welcome aboard, Anthony Casale!
9/3/2020: Congratulations on passing your Literature Review, Mona!
8/27/2020: We are pleased to welcome undergraduate researchers Autumn Cook and Aaliyah Khan to the group!
8/15/2020: Congratulations on graduating UMBC this summer, Robert!
8/12/2020: Our manuscript on exploring new functional materials has been accepted to J. Phys. Chem. C.!
Link to JPCC paper
6/1/2020: Summer research is well underway
3/29/2020: We are pleased to welcome undergraduate researcher Ryan Grimes to the group!
3/15/2020: We are pleased to welcome undergraduate researchers Joshua Leginze and Robert Zochowski!
3/6/2020: Graduate Research Day was a success. Congratulations to all of the presenters!
11/18/2019: The final version of our first UMBC research paper titled “Surveying Polar Materials in the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database to Identify Emerging Polar Structure Types” is available!
Link to JSSC article
10/31/2019: Our first UMBC research paper was accepted!
09/27/2019: Dr. Mona Layegh officially joins the group, and will be co-mentored by Prof. Zeev Rosenzweig.
09/20/2019: Our NSF XSEDE Startup Request was approved! The two projects described in our proposal called “Atomistic Insights into Safer Water and Cleaner Energy from Density Functional Theory” will require a lot of computational horsepower over the next year.
08/26/2019: Dr. Mona Layegh begins her rotation. Welcome to DFT, Mona!
07/01/2019: Dr. Bennett arrives at UMBC