Congratulations to Jaehyeok Jin (PhD '21) for winning the Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemical Sciences. The Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship is awarded to exceptional young scientists in the core areas of fundamental chemistry for three years of competitive funding of $270,000 for stipend and research support.
Jaehyeok was born in Seoul, South Korea, where he double majored in Chemistry and Mathematical Sciences as an undergraduate at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Then, Jaehyeok started his graduate studies at UChicago to pursue his degree in theoretical chemistry. “UChicago is a hub for modern theoretical chemistry,” he commented. First, Jaehyeok was a PhD student and then a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Professor Gregory A. Voth, where he developed rigorous bottom-up coarse-graining methods to investigate complex molecular soft matter. Among the multiple other honors and awards Jaehyeok earned at UChicago, was the Harper Dissertation Fellowship, the highest honor for graduate students at UChicago, for his outstanding doctorate research and dissertation entitled, “Statistical mechanical paradigms for next-generation multiscale theory and simulation.”
Jaehyeok has recently started his postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of David R. Reichman at Columbia University, where he will move on much larger scales and will develop a new multiscale theory for next-generation energy storage materials. “What I learned at UChicago has given me the experience and skill set to help me tackle one of the most important problems in chemistry and environments,” he says.