Vinayak Bhat

In August 2023, I will be starting as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina, USA. I obtained my PhD in Computational Chemsitry under the supervision of Dr. Chad Risko at University of Kentucky, USA. I have an integrated Masters’ degree from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram, India. My undergraduate research was in organic synthesis, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, photochemistry, Cryo-electron microscopy image processing and computational chemistry – molecular dynamics and density functional theory.

For PhD research, I considered pursing computational chemistry. In Dr. Risko’s laboratory, my projects involved accelerating the development of organic electronic materials with the aid of computational chemistry methods. I was one of the lead developers of OCELOT which is an infrastructure for data-driven materials discovery. During the course of development of OCELOT, I have gained expertise in database management, automated high-throughput workflows, web app development and deployment and machine learning.

When I am not doing research, I conduct workshops which are aimed at introductory coding in python for chemistry.