Christian Knox received a Department of Energy research award

Christian Knox, a third-year chemistry PhD student in the University of Pittsburgh Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has been selected to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program. Knox is a part of Peng Liu’s research group.

The SCGSR program offers PhD students the opportunity to advance their thesis research while working at a Department of Energy national laboratory. SCGSR provides its participants with training, expertise, resources and access to state-of-the-art facilities. Knox is one of 79 students from 56 universities across 26 states selected for the program this year.

This award will provide Knox with a monthly stipend to support his research at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s National Synchrotron Light Source II lab in Upton, New York.

"I'm very excited to travel to Brookhaven National Lab to work on a joint computational and experimental study of organometallic catalysis with Dali Yang,” said Knox. “My hope is to utilize the expertise of computational methods such as density functional theory that we use in my lab, along with the expertise in x-ray absorption spectroscopy that is employed at the National Synchrotron Light Source II, to provide evidence and explanation for the fundamental mechanistic processes that first-row transition metal catalysis can achieve."