Principal Investigator

Steven Dajnowicz - is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Interdisciplinary Data Science at the University of Toledo. Before returning to UT, he was a Senior Principal Scientist and Product Manager of Materials Force Fields at Schrödinger, where he directed efforts to advance classical force fields for life science and materials applications. As a member of the Columbia Center for Computational Electrochemistry, he developed machine learning force fields to deliver predictive insights into the thermodynamic, transport, and electrochemical properties of battery materials. Steven earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toledo as an ORNL Research Fellow. His doctoral research combined X-ray and neutron scattering with computational modeling to elucidate the fundamental mechanisms of enzymatic catalysis.

Graduate Students

Eva Laffont — (B.S. Chemical Engineering, École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Mulhouse)
Research areas: Computational Biophysics

Madison Martin Erickson — (B.S. Applied Mathematics and Chemistry, The University of Central Arkansas and M.S. Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of California, Merced)
Research areas: Computational Synthetic Organic: Her research sits at the intersection of synthetic and computational chemistry, where she applies DFT-based methods to understand and predict the reactivity of hypervalent iodine catalysis and photocatalytic alkene difunctionalization reactions.