News 2024
© Paesani Research Group. All rights reserved.
• January 5: We welcome undergraduate student Benjamin Savala and graduate students Jiwon Huh, Suman Saha,
and Vibhu Singh.
• January 21-26: Francesco is a speaker at the Gordon Research Conference Chemical Separations.
• January 31: Francesco is the speaker for the Physical Chemistry Seminar at UC Irvine.
• February 2: Etienne is has been awarded the ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship and will spend the fall quarter
doing research in the group of Prof. Stefan Vučkovic at the University of Fribourg.
• February 4-9: Francesco is a speaker at the Gordon Research Conference Molecular and Ionic Clusters.
• February 14: Francesco is the speaker for the Physical Chemistry Seminar at CSU Long Beach.
• February 19: Our article Molecular insights into the influence of ions on the water structure. I. Alkali metal ions in
solution appears in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B.
• February 27: Francesco is the speaker for the Physical Chemistry Seminar at Rutgers University.
• March 1: We hold the annual meeting for our AFOSR MURI project "Unraveling the Mechanisms of Ice
Nucleation and Anti-Icing Through an Integrated Multiscale Approach".
• March 1: Our article Molecular driving forces for water adsorption in MOF-808: A comparative analysis with UiO-66
appears in The Journal of Chemical Physics.
• March 3-8: Etienne, Ching-Hwa, and Francesco present our research at the National Meeting of the American
• March 8: Our article Monitoring water harvesting in metal–organic frameworks, one water molecule at a time
appears in Chemical Science.
• March 15: Yaoguang graduates and embarks on a new journey at Amazon as a software engineer. Congratulations!
• March 17-21: Francesco presents our research at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
• March 26: Our article Cooperative interactions with water drive hysteresis in a hydrophilic metal–organic framework
in collaboration with the Dincă group at MIT appears in Chemistry of Materials.
• April 8: Our article Many-body interactions and deep neural network potentials for water appears in the Journal of
Chemical Physics.
• April 16: Etienne is nominated UC President’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Fellow.
• April 17: Our article Monitoring water harvesting in metal-organic frameworks, one water molecule at a time is
featured in ChemistryWorld.
• April 27: Etienne shares his experience as a US-Mexico transborder students with STEM from Podcast.
• May 8: Our article Pinpointing the location of the elusive liquid-liquid critical point in water is posted on ChemRxiv.
• May 21: Benjamin presents his research on nuclear quantum effects in ion hydration at the Undergraduate
Research Conference as part of his McNair Fellowship.
• May 21: Roya receives the Dean's Undergraduate Excellence Award for her research on ion hydration.
• May 25-30: Francesco presents our research on supercooled water at WaterX.
• June 1-7: Cianna, Richa, Xuanyu, Ethan, and Henry pass their qualifyng exams.
• June 5: Ching-Hwa graduates.
• June 6: Our article Nuclear quantum effects and the Grotthuss mechanism dictate the pH of liquid water is posted
on ChemRxiv.
• June 10-21: Our groups organizes the Summer Workshop on Molecular Simulations at Louisiana State University
in collaboration with Prof. Revati Kumar (Lousiana State University) and Dr. Chris Knight (Argonne National Lab /
The University of Chicago).
• June 16-21: Francesco presents our research on quantum dynamics and tunneling in aqeuous systems at the XXI
International Workshop on Quantum Atomic and Molecular Tunneling Systems (QAMTS2024) in San Sebastian.
• June 18: Francesco presents our research on data-driven many-body simulations at nanoGUNE.
• June 23-28: Francesco presents our research on the phase behavior of water as predicted by our MB-pol
data-driven many-body potential at the XXII Symposium on Thermophysical Properties and XVIII International
Conference on the Properties of Water and Steam in Boulder.
• June 24-28: Suman and Vibhu give their lectures on our data-driven many-body potentials and their applications to
water harvesting, carbon capture, seawater mining, and ion transport using MOFs at the Quantum Multiscale
School at Boise State University.
• June 29 - July 1: Francesco presents our research on data-driven many-body potentials at the 2024 International
Symposium on Computational Molecular Science and Machine Learning at New York University Shanghai.
• June 30 - July 5: Etienne attends the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.
• July 3: Francesco gives a seminar on data-driven many-body simulations and their applications to water harvesting
using MOFs at Westlake University.
• July 5: Francesco gives a seminar on data-driven many-body potentials and their extensions to density functional
theory at Peking University.
• July 9: Francesco gives a seminar on data-driven many-body simulations at the Institute of Chemistry of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences.
• July 10: Francesco visits DP Technology in Beijing.
• July 17: Our group hosts John Pederson from the McDaniel group (Georgia Tech) who presents his work on the
QM/MM/PME method, and latest developments in the PyDFT-QMMM software.
• July 15-19: Francesco presents our research on water harvesting using MOFs at the 9th International Conference
on Metal-Organic Frameworks and Open Framework Compounds.
• July 21-26: Jiwon, Henry, and Xuanyu present their research on data-driven many-body simulations at the GRC
• July 28-30: Benjamin presents his research on nuclear quantum effects in ion hydration at the McNair Conference
at UC Los Angeles.
• August 4-9: Richa presents her research on vibrational sum-frequency spectroscopy of the ice surface at the GRC
• August 13: Our article Current status of the MB-pol data-driven many-body potential for predictive simulations of
water across different phases is posted on ChemRxiv.
• August 14-15: Benjamin presents his research on nuclear quantum effects in ion hydration at the Summer
Research Conference at UC San Diego.
• August 18-22: Yuanhui presents his research on charge transport in COFs and Francesco presents our MBX
software for data-driven many-body simulations at the ACS National Meeting in Denver.
• August 23: Cianna combines simulations with deep learning tools to design protein binders for human EGFR,
which will be tested by Adaptyv Bio as part of their protein design competition.
• August 25-30: Saswata and Vikrant attend the Quantum Multiscale Hackathon at Boise State University where
they present our research on density-corrected DFT and QM/MB approaches.
• August 27-29: Francesco presents our research on data-driven many-body potentials for aqueous solutions at the
CECAM workshop Machine Learning Potentials: From Interfaces to Solution.