Professors Surendranath and Willard smile in a hallway.

Surendranath and Willard earn Tenure

Categories: Faculty

Professors Yogesh Surendranath and Adam Willard have been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure effective July 1, 2020.

Professor Yogesh Surendranath, currently the Paul M Cook Career Development Associate Professor, and Associate Professor Adam P. Willard have both been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure, effective July 1, 2020.

Surendranath received his B.S. from University of Virginia in 2006, and his PhD from MIT in 2011. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Chemistry faculty in 2013.  The Surendranath Lab is focused on addressing global challenges in the areas of chemical catalysis, energy storage and utilization, and environmental stewardship. Fundamental and technological advances in each of these areas require new methods for controlling the selectivity and efficiency of inner-sphere reactions at solid-liquid interfaces. Their strategy emphasizes the bottom-up, molecular-level, engineering of functional inorganic interfaces with a current focus on electrochemical energy conversion.

Willard received his B.S. from the University of Puget Sound in 2003, and his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Following postdoctoral fellowships at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin, he joined the Chemistry faculty in 2013. Research in the Willard group uses theory and simulation to explore the role of molecular fluctuation in a variety of chemical phenomena. They are particularly interested in systems for which a mean field approach, i.e., the averaging out of molecular-level detail, fails to reproduce experimental results. This is often a consequence of complex molecular scale behavior such as collectivity, spatial or dynamic heterogeneity, or the coupling of fast and slow time or length scales, which can give rise to interesting and unexpected macroscopic phenomena.