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December 14, 2021  Former Laird and Thompson Group member Zeke Piskulich has been announced as one of three finalists for the 2022 Jankunas Doctoral Dissertation Award in Chemical Physics from the American Chemical Society. He will be presenting a talk at the March APS meeting and the winner will be announced shortly afterwards.

August 5, 2021 Zeke Piskulich's paper "Molecular Simulations of Phase Equilibria and Transport Properties in a Model CO2-Expanded Lithium Perchlorate Electrolyte" has  been published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. 

June 8, 2021  Congratulations to group member Dr.  Seth Martin for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Structure and thermodynamics of solid-fluid interfaces: simulation and theory" 

May 7, 2021   Congratulations to group member Dr. Zeke Piskulich for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Beyond Arrhenius: Fluctation Theory for Dynamics". 

January, 2019 Joyce Nyugen and Micah Welsch have joined the group as first-year graduate students. Welcome!

August 24, 2018  Seth Martin's first paper with the Laird group has been chosen as a Feature Article/Editors pick for the Journal of Chemical Physics. The paper, entitled "Thermodynamics of the hard-disk fluid at a planar hard wall: Generalized scaled-particle theory and Monte Carlo simulation" has is also featured as an American Institute of Physics "SciLight" 

April 5, 2018: Congratulations to Ph.D. Student Zeke Piskulich of the Laird and Thompson Groups on receiving a prestigious NSF Graduate Student Fellowship. 

November 27, 2017:   Former Laird Group member Dr. Scott Bembenek appeared on Cara Santa Maria's Talk Nerdy podcast (Episode 186) to promote his new popular science book The Cosmic Machine

August 5-11, 2017:  Zeke Piskulich attended the Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) and Conference (GRC) on the Physics and Chemistry of Liquids and was elected co-chair of the 2019 GRS on this topic. 

July 27, 2017 Summer 2017 Laird Group REU student Trevor Neal (Westminster College) presented a poster entitled "Increasing the efficiency of electrostatic calculations for vapor-liquid equilibnrium at the 2017 KU Undergraduate Research Poster Session. [Photo]

July, 2017 Seth Martin attended the CCP5 Molecular Dynamics Workshop in Lancaster England. 

June 2017 Former graduate student, Isaak Daniels, started a postoc at McGill University in Montreal, Canada in the group of Prof. Alejandro Rey in Chemical Engineering.

June 2017  Brian Laird visited former postdoc Yang Yang at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai, China and gave talks in both Physics and Chemsitry Departments at ECNU and Jiao Tong University.

Dec. 15, 2016  Seth Martin has joined the group as a new graduate student. Welcome!

Dec. 15, 2016  Dr. Isaak Daniel's paper with Zhenxing Wang and Brian Laird "Dielectic Properties of Organic Solvents in an Electric Field" has been accepted to the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. 

August 2016 Dr. Pablo Palafox-Hernandez's paper with Brian Laird "Orientation dependence of heterogeneous nucleation at the Cu–Pb solid-liquid interface" was accept to the Journal of Chemical Physics. 

July 4, 2016  Dr. Pansy Patel's paper with Brian Laird and Ward Thompson "A Density Functional Theory Study of Ethylene Epoxidation Catalyzed by Niobium-doped Silica" has been accepted in the Journal of Molecular Catalysis. 

June 2016  Brian Laird has been appointed as an External Senior Fellow of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Freiburg, Germany. He will be there during his sabbatical in Summer and Fall 2016. He will also be working with the group of Roland Roth at the University of Tübingen Physics Department

May 23, 2016 Our paper "Electric potential calculation in molecular simulation of electric double layer capacitors" by Zhenxing Wang, David Olmsted, Mark Asta and Brian B. Laird has been accepted to a Special Issue on the Physics of Supercapacitors and Electroactuators in J. Phys.: Condensed Matter.

February 2016 Our paper "Tunability of Gas-Expanded Liquids under Confinement: Phase Equilibrium and Transport Properties of Ethylene-Expanded Methanol in Mesoporous Silica" [J. Phys. Chem. C, 120, 5010-5019 (2016)] was published online. 

Laird Group News

November  2023: Our collaboration paper with the Davidchack group at the University of Leicester has been published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. "Analysis of probability of inserting a hard spherical particle with small diameter in hard-sphere fluid", R.L. Davidchack, A. Elmajdoub, and Brian B. Laird, J. Chem. Phys. 159 184503 (2023).

November 2023: Congrats to Joyce Nguyen! Her paper "Generation of amorphous silica surfaces with controlled roughness", N.P Nguyen and B.B. Laird, has been published as  J. Phys. Chem. A. 127 9831-9841 (2023). 

October 2022: Our paper "Inside and out: Surface thermodynamics from positive to negative curvature" by Seth C. Martin, Hendrik Hansen-Goos, Roland Roth and Brian B. Laird was chosen as the September 2022 recipient of the KU Chemistry Faculty Research Impact Award. 

April 17, 2022: Congratulations to former group member Dr. Zeke Piskulich has been selected as the 2022 Marnie and Bill Argersinger Dissertation Award for the top KU dissertation in a STEM field.

March 15, 2022  Former Laird and Thompson Group member Zeke Piskulich has been announced as the winner of the  2022 Jankunas Doctoral Dissertation Award in Chemical Physics from the American Chemical Society.

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