I’m honored to share that from June 1st, 2025, until the end of May 2026, I will hold the rotating visiting professorship (bijzondere leerstoel) at the Amsterdam Centre for Multiscale Modelling (ACMM). This position is supported by an HRSMC Fellowship from the Holland Research School of Molecular Chemistry.
As part of this role, I will spend several weeks at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) over the coming year, engaging in research activities and delivering lectures.
My former PhD student and current collaborator, Daniel Zhang, obtained a Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility (FRIPRO) by the Research Council of Norway. His project is titled "Dragon Kings in the Molecular Realm: Accelerated Sampling of Chemical Outliers".
The grant will enable Daniel to extend his stay by two years in Okayama, Japan, working with Prof. Wataru Shinoda's research group, where he will continue his research on path sampling methodology and apply it to several relevant applications central to Shinoda's laboratory. The grant also covers a return to Norway after two years, where Daniel will bring his expertise back to NTNU to continue his research for another year.
Lots of exciting research updates! Today marked the final day of our eScience-Center/Lorentz workshop, A Time Warp in Digital Chemical Discoveries.
The workshop was highly productive and resulted in the initiative to create a unified code base, GUTS (Grand Unified Trajectory Sampling), for which we have now established a steering board. Additionally, Daniel Zhang, who defended his PhD thesis in May (see below), participated in the workshop and has now headed to Japan to begin his postdoc. To top it all off, the workshop concluded with fantastic news: I received a 12 million NOK (1 million Euro) grant from the Research Council of Norway to develop the next phase of the InfinityRETIS algorithm, with exciting new applications on the horizon!
Daniel successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "Asynchronous and Infinite Replica Exchange Transition Interface Sampling" and is now officially a Doctor! The opponents were Prof. Peter Bolhuis from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Prof. Carme Rovira from the University of Barcelona, Spain (who attended online). Associate Prof. Senbo Xiao from NTNU served as the administrator of the committee.
Daniel and the opponents engaged in a lively and insightful discussion on rare event modeling techniques, showcasing the depth of the research. After the defense, the committee unanimously agreed that both the thesis and the defense were deserving of the doctoral title.
Below is a photo with Daniel (3rd from the left), the committee members—Senbo (far left), Peter (second from the left), and Carme (on screen)—and myself, the supervisor (far right):
We got some publicity about our recent PNAS paper in the popular scientific magazine Gemini:
Our initiative to establish a Gemini Center COSY (COmputational multi-Scale materials societY) has been approved and funded. Gemini Centers are collaborative platforms involving NTNU, SINTEF, and UiO. The COSY center aims to unite researchers from these institutions working in the field of molecular modeling.
I'm excited to announce that our proposal titled "A Time Warp in Digital Chemical Discoveries" has been selected as the winner of the eScience Center - Lorentz Competition 2023!