Todd Gingrich receives prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF)

Todd Gingrich has received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the foundation’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty members.Gingrich is an assistant professor of chemistry in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He will receive $650,000 over five years from NSF’s Chemical Theory, Models, and Computational Methods Program in the Division of Chemistry.

Gingrich is a theoretical chemist specializing in the dynamics of nonequilibrium systems such as those found in living matter. Design problems are ubiquitous in chemistry. Many computer algorithms exist for predicting and rationalizing how to design molecules to favor certain structures in equilibrium, but to mimic the chemical capabilities of living systems, chemists must extend their designs of molecules to consider what happens when they consume chemical fuels and expel waste. Gingrich and his group develop and apply algorithms to simulate chemical kinetics in those nonequilibrium regimes.

His CAREER project is titled “Reaction-Diffusion Kinetics with Tensor Networks.”

To design electronic circuitry, it’s useful to be able to compute and simulate how electrons will flow through miniature wires at different points in time. A different type of circuitry runs inside the cells that power our lives: Instead of electrons flowing through wires, these biophysical circuits are controlled by the way different molecules interact with each other, react and diffuse apart. Simulating such motion presents many technical and scientific challenges, particularly because individual molecules tend to move with a degree of randomness.

The CAREER award will support Gingrich and his group in their design of a novel mathematical and computational approach simulating the way networks of molecules react and diffuse. In addition to the scientific research efforts, the project includes an initiative to develop and share online educational simulations to teach undergraduate and graduate students about reaction-diffusion chemistry.