ACS PHYS Graduate Student Award Winners 2025

Congratulations to the ACS PHYS Graduate Student Award finalists who gave great presentations at our virtual symposium and to the four winners (two in Experimental and two in Theory).  The ACS PHYS community looks forward to seeing all of your amazing work in your future scientific journeys.

Sponsored by:

Experimental Physical Chemistry

Bailey Raine Nebgen
University of California at Berkeley
Advisor: Miachael W. Zuerch

Towards All-Optical Electronic Structure Characterization in Complex Environments: Solid-State High Harmonic Spectroscopy

Raiden Speelman
Northwestern University
Advisor: Franz M. Geiger

Bridging Electrochemistry and Nonlinear Optics: Studying the Oxygen Evolution Reaction with Second Harmonic Generation

Theoretical Physical Chemistry

Shiv Rheki
Texas A&M University
Advisor: Jeetain Mittal

Decoding the Molecular Language of Disordered Protein Phase Separation

Benjamin X. Shi
Flatiron Institute
Advisor: Angelos Michaelides

It’s Not a S(KZ)CAM! Accurate Surface Chemistry at Low Cost

We’d also like to congratulate the other finalists on a great presentation!

Experimental Physical Chemistry

José L. Godínez Castellanos (University of Southern California)
Advisor: Stephen Bradforth
“Illuminating the Photochemistry of Biomolecules with Multi-Octave Soliton Probing”

Jesse Brown (Utah State University)
Advisor: Yi Rao
“Vibrational Sum-Frequency Scattering from Airborne Droplet Surfaces”

Theoretical Physical Chemistry

Mohammad Elious Ali Mondal (University of Rochester)
Advisor: Pengfei Huo
“Scalable Quantum Dynamics for Exciton Polaritons”

Zhenling Wang (University of California Berkely)
Advisor: Martin Head-Gordon
“A New Fast and Accurate Local Correlation Formalism: Life after DLPNO”