Poster Award with title “Electronic Structure and Spectroscopy of Transition Metal Complexes”

Maria Drosou, a second-year PhD student in the group of Prof. Mitsopoulou, has been awarded a Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics Poster Prize at Summer School: ‘Electronic Structure and Spectroscopy of Transition Metal Complexes’, which held from 29 September – 4 October 2019 at Gelsenkirchen, Germany and was attended by 80 young researchers. The summer school was jointly organized by Prof. Frank Neese Dr. Serena DeBeer and Dr D. Pantazis working at the Mülheim Max-Planck Institutes (MPI für Chemische Energiekonversion and MPI für Kohlenforschung) (https://summerschool.cec.mpg.de/index.php?id=1202). It was also supported by the the Editorial Board of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (PCCP) of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The summer school focused particularly on how the combination of spectroscopic techniques with quantum chemistry and high-level computation is used in transition metal chemistry. This combination is a fundamental component of modern molecular sciences since it drives cutting-edge research in fields ranging from inorganic chemistry to biochemistry and from catalysis to energy research.

Her Poster titled: ‘DFT Studies on the Mechanism of Hydrogen Evolution Catalyzed by Nickel Thiolates’ (M. Drosou, A. Zarkadoulas, F. Kamatsos, C. A. Mitsopoulou), and is part of her PhD research, which includes DFT and ab initio calculations for elucidating the mechanism of HER with catalysts of non- noble and abundant metal complexes in photocatalysis and elecrocatalysis.