Dr. Dae Young Bae, a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Liviu Mirica's research group at Illinois, has received the inaugural Anuj Khandelwal Memorial Travel Award.
The Anuj Khandelwal Memorial Fund was established in 2019 in memory of Anuj Khandelwal, who was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of chemistry Prof. Martin Burke from 2016 until Khandelwal's tragic passing in 2017. Created by his friends and family, the fund supports the Anuj Khandelwal Memorial Travel Award, which provides conference travel funding for postdoctoral researchers in the Department of Chemistry.
Dae Young, who has never attended an in-person national conference in the U.S., will use this award to travel to the Fall American Chemical Society National Meeting in San Francisco in August 2023.
Dae Young joined the Mirica research group in 2021. He received his PhD from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), South Korea, working in the group of Prof. Eunsung Lee on the nitrogen fixation by transition metal complexes with a highly sterically demanding triphenolate amine ligand.
In the Mirica group, Dae Young’s main contributions are in the area of organometallic, especially for C-C and C-heteroatom bond formation reactions.
Mirica said Dae Young has been an essential member of the research group. He added that he is one of the top postdoctoral scholars he has ever had in his research group and among the top 10 percent of students and postdoctoral scholars he has worked with during his academic training at Caltech, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. Mirica said Dae Young is first author on a detailed mechanistic study that will be submitted for publication very soon and has made significant contributions to a recently published work on C–H bonds and is first author on another manuscript that will be submitted soon describing an extensive set of computational studies that Dae Young has just completed.
Mirica said Dae Young has been very productive, showing great motivation to complete assigned projects and well-written manuscript drafts and has also demonstrated great resilience in attacking difficult scientific problems.
"Dae Young is a very strong, independent researcher with a great scientific curiosity and incredible work ethic. Moreover, Dae Young is extremely knowledgeable and served as an excellent mentor for graduate students and undergraduates, always willing to help everyone in the lab with any questions they may have, suggesting that he will be an excellent teacher and research mentor," Mirica said.
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