Christian Venturella was chosen for the 2024 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship for his exceptional aptitude in advanced chemistry.
The prestigious fellowship, awarded by the Department of Defense (DoD), will provide Venturella with an annual stipend of $43,200, full tuition, and a travel budget to attend conferences for three years, as well as professional development and mentorship opportunities. The aim of the fellowship is to propel talented individuals toward groundbreaking discoveries and innovations related to DoD interests.
Venturella, a 2nd-year graduate student in the Zhu Group, specializes in theoretical chemistry and computational materials science.
“The discovery of new materials with specific quantum mechanical properties is essential to key academic and industrial applications,” Venturella explains. “My research aims to accurately predict these properties while avoiding the prohibitively high cost of traditional quantum chemistry calculations.
To do this, I will develop an approach to accelerate many-body quantum chemistry with artificial intelligence. My goal is to unify the prediction of several chemical properties by learning the Green’s function, a mathematical representation of many-body physics.”
Venturella’s research will help design desirable molecules and materials in domains ranging from renewable energy to electronics design.
Learn more about the work done by the Zhu Group.