By Irene Hsiao
Congratulations to Pengfei Ji (MS 2015, PhD 2018) for receiving a Miller Research Fellowship! The Miller Fellowship is awarded to exceptional young scientists of great promise to support three years of postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley.
Ji was born in Bozhou, China, the capital of Chinese medicine, where seeing herbs grown, collected, and used as cures for disease led him to an early interest in chemistry and biology. Experiments by a middle school chemistry teacher further piqued his curiosity, and Ji was a committed chemistry major by high school. After an accelerated BS in Chemistry from Sichuan University, he arrived at UChicago for graduate school in 2014, excited by the University’s legacy of groundbreaking science—Enrico Fermi’s discovery of nuclear fission, Robert Mulliken’s invention of molecular orbital theory, and more.
At Chicago, Ji joined the lab of Wenbin Lin, James Franck Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry, where he rapidly excelled. With two patents and sixteen papers—twelve as first author—Ji completed his thesis, “Transforming Hydroxides in Metal-Organic Framework Nodes for Catalytic Applications,” this past fall. “Pengfei is one of the most dedicated and creative young chemists I have worked with,” says Lin. “His doctoral work established a totally new strategy for studying earth-abundant metal catalysis and will likely have a lasting impact on designing metal-organic framework catalysts.”
This spring, Ji will be joining the lab of John F. Hartwig, Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry at Berkeley, where he anticipates working on artificial metalloenzymes. “I believe this research field holds the key to solving many crucial problems in drug discovery and energy sustainability,” he says.