Kimberly Daas joins UC Irvine as new Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

Kimberly  J. Daas recently joined the UC Irvine Department of Chemistry as UC Irvine Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Daas’ appointment will last two years, and she’ll work with Professor Kieron Burke on Density Functional Theory (DFT), which is the workhorse of quantum chemical simulations, and which is widely used in chemistry, physics and material science due to its high accuracy and low computational cost. Daas will focus on furthering understanding of a field in DFT called semiclassics, which sits at the intersection of classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. Daas recently defended her Ph.D. thesis at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she worked in the group of Professor Paola Gori-Giorgi. For her dissertation, Daas derived a new exact theory that can accurately describe non-covalent interactions, which are a collection of weak interactions between molecules like hydrogen bonds that standard quantum chemical methods cannot easily describe. Daas’ method can be used to study such weak interactions in chemistry and material science. During her fellowship, Daas will also try to help early-career LGBTQ+ and especially trans students and researchers navigate the obstacles they face in academia.