Professor Philippe Sautet

French Academy of Sciences Member

Professor Sautet received his Ph.D. in1989, in Paris-Orsay Unversity in France, and did his Habilitation to direct research in Lyon 1 University. He was a visiting scientist in UC Berkeley/LBL in 1991-1992. Then, he was a Director of research, Director of the Laboratoire de Chimie, Director of the Institut de Chimie de Lyon, and Exceptional class director of reserach at CNSR, ENS Lyon, France. Since 2016, he is a Professor in UCLA and CNSI. Sautet is a world-renounced scholar and a recepient of many awards, including the Membership in the French Academy of Sciences, Chevalier de l'ordre des palmes academiques, Pierre Sue Grand Prize of the French Chemical Society, and the Silver Medal of CNRS. Sautet's research interests are in the area of theoretical surface chemistry and heterogeneous and electro-catalysis.

Team

Michael Ngan

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PhD Student

Michael received his B.S. in Chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. He is currently a PhD student at UCLA and focuses on hydrogenation reactions on single-atom alloy (SAA) catalysts

Yani Guan

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PhD Student

Yani focuses on electrochemical amination, from Levulinic Acid to Pyrrolidone.

Robert Kowalski

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PhD Student

Robert received his B.S. in chemical engineering from University of California, Davis in 2022. His undergraduate work was on creating machine-learned potentials for metal clusters inside zeolites under Dr. Ambarish Kulkarni. His current work focuses on using different electrocatalysis and CO2 capture agents to undergo reactive carbon capture.

Vaidish Sumaria

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PhD Student

Vaidish Sumaria is a graduate (Ph.D.) student in the CBE department at UCLA. He received his B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering with specialization in Refining and Petrochemicals at the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, India and then got his M.S. Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He works on understanding the restructuring of model metal catalysts in reactant gases. The project involves building a DFT data base and training a High Dimensional Neural Network Potential (currently) for CO on Pt surfaces. The work will also be extended to other metal catalysts.

Celine Tesvara

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PhD Student

Celine received her bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering from Penn State University in 2018. She is currently interested in investigating iron oxides surface stability as candidates for single atom metal catalysis support.

Kerry Chen

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Undergraduate Student

Kerry is a 4th year undergraduate student in Chemical Engineering. She works with Yantao and learns the etching process of nitrogen on copper metal with machine learning potentials constructed from quantum chemical data.

Yantao Xia

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PhD Student

Yantao is a PhD student in chemical engineering. He got his B.S. in chemical engineering in 2018 and M.S. in chemical engineering in 2020, both from UCLA. He is working on developing novel chemical processes applicable to atomic layer etching, a technique that promises single atom layer control in semiconductor fabrication.

Simran Kumari

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PhD Student

Simran is a graduate (Ph.D.) student in the CBE department at UCLA. She joined the group in the Fall of 2019. She received her Integrated BS-MS degree in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research-Kolkata, India. She did her master’s thesis research work at EPFL under the supervision of Prof. Nicola Marzari. Her current research interests lie in understanding the electrocatalytic properties of Pt-clusters on oxide supports such as Indium Tin Oxide.

David Jiang

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PhD Student

David Jiang graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor’s in Science in Chemical Engineering. His undergraduate work focused centered on nanocrystal-driven photothermal conversion. He joined Sautet group in 2020 and currently works on computational modelling of metal catalyst restructuring alongside senior group members.

Alumni

Addis Fuhr

Staff Scientist

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Geng Sun

Postdoc Fellow

UCLA

Pallavi Bothra

Postdoc Fellow

UCLA

George Yan

PhD Student

UCLA

Ziyang Wei

PhD Student

UCLA

Andrew Todt

Undergraduate Student

UCLA

Nicole Chiang

Undergraduate Student

UCLA

Huy Nguyen

Undergraduate Student

UCLA