PNNL

Sotiris Xantheas has been awarded a visiting fellowship from the International Center for Advanced Studies of Energy Conversion (ICASEC) at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany. Under this fellowship, he spent the month of May 2022 at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute with Professor Alec Wodtke’s research group. The group initiated research collaborations aimed at developing descriptors of chemical reactivity on surfaces related to energy conversion.

“We were so pleased to be able to host Sotiris in Göttingen as part of an ICASEC fellowship,” said Wodtke. “His work on the many-body potential of liquid water is respected worldwide. He is now turning his expertise to study the many-body potentials of solid surfaces with molecular adsorbates. This has the promise to be a major breakthrough in heterogeneous catalysis and we are excited to compare his results to observations from experiments being carried out in our labs. This will undoubtedly lead to a better understanding of how atoms and molecules behave at surfaces."

At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Xantheas directs the Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Institute—a premier international center for scalable computational chemistry software and methods development. The theoretical work performed at the Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Institute complements the experiments performed at ICASEC.

“The researchers at ICASEC are some of the world’s leading experts on dynamics at surfaces,” said Xantheas. “I am proud and excited to collaborate with them to build a theoretical framework to describe energy conversions and catalysis at these surfaces.”

Through this prestigious fellowship, Xantheas will continue to build collaborations and pursue joint research projects with ICASEC researchers.

Xantheas is a Laboratory fellow in the Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division at PNNL, a University of Washington–PNNL Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Chemistry Department, and a Specially Appointed Professor in the World Research Hub Initiative at the Tokyo Technological Institute in Tokyo, Japan. He received his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the National Polytechnic University of Athens, Greece, and his PhD in chemistry from Iowa State University. Xantheas has received numerous awards and international recognition for his work from various organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Fulbright Foundation, the European Union, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Washington Academy of Sciences.