Dmitry Vinichenko

Dmitry, an alumnus of Moscow State University, entered Harvard's Chemical Physics graduate program in 2012. In his research Dmitry takes advantage of the twenty-first century's rapidly developing computational resources in order to obtain atomic level insights into mechanisms of surface reactions from ab initio simulations of environmentally and industrially relevant processes catalyzed by the transition metal oxides, particularly, titania: photochemical splitting of water, reduction of carbon dioxide, oxidation of environmental pollutants. Dmitry's research is directed towards the fundamental microscopic understanding of chemical processes through first principles simulations using modern quantum theory of matter. More specifically, studying heterogeneous catalyzed photochemical reactions on surfaces of semiconductors and more complex hybrid structures. The ultimate goal is to devise first principles based methodologies for prediction and modeling the mechanisms of heterogeneous processes, and, eventually, for the computational design of catalytic materials.