During the second semester of the academic year 2025-26 the QuATOMs group has the pleasure to welcome no less than 4 Bachelor intern students from Chemistry, and 2 junior master internships from biomedical sciences, in addition to our master materiomics student Bram Makowski, and Pedro Perrout who joined us from Brazil during the first semester. The coming few months, these students will be introduced into the marvellous world of computational research, and perform their first large true research project.
Welcome to all students of this year
Bram Makowski (Materiomics), who is studying hybrid perovskites using molecular dynamics modelling.
Pedro Perrout (extern: USP, Brazil), who studied the QM9 database, focussing on creating a chemical inspired fingerprint.
Deborah Gagliardi (Chemistry, pre-materiomics), who will study H diffusion in diamond by means of molecular dynamics using veloxchem.
Saba Heidarian (Chemistry, pre-materiomics), who will implement an LS-SVM classifier and study the QM9 dataset, placing her first steps into the world of machine learning.
Brent Janssens (Chemistry), who will study vibrational spectra of diamond color centers and molecules using quantum chemical calculations .
Aerts Milan (Chemistry), Jasper Schrijvers (Biomedical), and Lana Vandamme (Biomedical), who will datamine various datasets of molecules to learn more about the fundamental nature of chemical bonding.
For the second year in a row, we are organising a summerschool with the master materiomics program, oriented at students in their second or third bachelor chemistry or physics. Within this summerschool the students are introduced into the various topics which play an important role in materials research. Today, as part of the quantum pillar, I had the pleasure to introduce the students into the world of computational research, with a focus on the application for quantum mechanical modelling. We learned for example, that it is practically impossible to store the wavefunction of a simple small molecule like benzene, it would require more great deal more than a mole of galaxies in mass to store it. With Density Functional Theory on the other hand, you can easily investigate it on a modern day laptop, as you only need the electron density.
I enjoyed talking about the VirtualLab. Showed examples from atoms to galaxies, from computer-chips to drug-design and from to opinion-dynamics to epidemiology. I looked at the past and and glanced towards the future, where machine learning and artificial intelligence are the new kids on the block.
Saturday March 20th at 19h00, I have the pleasure of speaking at the TEDxUHasselt 2021 event.
We will visit the virtual lab and I’ll dive into the important questions about computational researchers: Who are we? Why do we like supercomputers…and rubber ducks? And what does the future hold?
Along the way, I’ll touch on the use of computational research for any subject imaginable: from atoms to galaxies, to the spread of diseases as well as opinions.
Update 22/03/2021:
The entire live-stream is still online available at here. (My presentation starts at ~7’30 😉 ).
Saturday March 20th at 19h00, I have the pleasure of speaking at the