Bodossaki Distinguished Young Scientist Awards 2023
Science: Chemistry
«I am especially gratefull to Bodossaki Foundation for recognizing my research work, and also for the honor to include me among the outstanding scientists who are recognized and awarded this year and in previous years. Through this distinction given to me in recognition of my work, there is acknowledgement for a scientific course of study that began 17 years ago in the classrooms and research laboratories of the Greek Universities where I studied. This acknowledgement will also be a source of motivation for new scientific discoveries in the field of chemistry.»
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Konstantinos Vogiatzis is Associate Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research focuses on the development of computational methods based on quantum chemistry and artificial intelligence to describe chemical systems relevant to clean, green technologies.
He was born in Athens in 1983, and in 2001 he graduated from the Hellenic-American Educational Foundation Athens College. He studied chemistry at the University of Athens, and in 2008 he completed a master’s degree on Applied Molecular Spectroscopy at the University of Crete. Then, he moved to Germany for completing his PhD at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he worked on the development of electronic structure theory methods. He also completed an eightmonth post-doctoral appointment at the Institute of Nanotechnology at KIT. In 2014, he worked on further post-doctoral research at the University of Minnesota. His postdoctoral research focused on the catalytic and sorption properties of porous materials, on homogenous catalysis, and on the development and application of strongly correlated methods with parallel computing.
In 2016, Konstantinos Vogiatzis joined the University of Tennessee as Assistant Professor and in 2021 he was early tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. In addition, he is faculty of the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education.
As an independent researcher, Konstantinos Vogiatzis focuses on the introduction of machine learning in computational chemistry for the in silico discovery of novel molecules and materials with enhanced properties. His research group has introduced new methods for the conversion of chemical structures into vectorized molecular representations that are used as input to machine learning algorithms. The new computational tools have been applied on the systematic exploration of molecular databases for the discovery of molecules with stronger affinity for carbon dioxide and for the discovery of structurefunctionality relations for catalysis. His work includes the accurate computation of van der Waals interactions for the theoretical study of gas separation processes, the elucidation of the atomistic effects that govern the diffusion of carbon dioxide through polymeric membranes, and the description of catalytic reactions promoted by transition metal complexes. His overall objectives are to elucidate the fundamental physical principles underlying the sorption and catalytic properties of molecules and materials, as well as to assist in the interpretation of experimental data. In addition, K. Vogiatzis and his group have developed a series of quantum chemical methods that utilize new machine learning methodologies for the approximate solution of the electronic Schrödinger equation.
He is the recipient of the 2020 and 2022 Ffrancon Williams Endowed Faculty Award in Chemistry, the OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award for Spring 2021 of the American Chemical Society, and the 2021 NSF CAREER award.
