John was born and raised in central Minnesota, and he is the product of public schools in the area. He then attended Wesleyan University and became interested in computational quantum chemistry doing undergraduate research with George Petersson. After a gap year of being an exchange student in Costa Rica and then a student researcher in Don Truhlar’s group at the University of Minnesota, he joined Bill Goddard’s research group at Caltech, where he earned his Ph.D. doing computational chemistry studies of homogeneous catalysis. He then joined Timo Jacob’s group at the University of Ulm and was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow studying electrocatalysis and model development. John returned to the U.S. and then was an associate research scholar in Emily Carter’s group when she was at Princeton University studying solar fuels research.
Since 2013 he has been an R.K. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2017 he was awarded an NSF-CAREER award. In 2019 he was promoted to associate professor with tenure. In 2019-2020 he was a visiting researcher at the University of Luxembourg working in Alexandre Tkatchenko’s research group. A staunch advocate for enhancing diversity and inclusivity in STEM fields, he serves on the Swanson School of Engineering’s Engineering Diversity Advisory Committee.
Students in his lab have gone on to do prestigious postdoc fellowships at U.S. national labs, industry jobs in engineering, data science, publishing, and software development. Graduates from his group have also continued on to elite research and academic institutions, and they have earned national recognition with the NSF-GRFP and the AIChE CoMSEF graduate student award.
When he is not working as a professor, he is a husband and parent of three children. His hobbies include doing crosswords and playing the cello whenever he can.
C.V.            Calendar
Professor - Chungnam National University, 2011
Post Doc - University of Chicago, 2010
PhD Chemistry - University of Pittsburgh, 2010
BS Chemical Engineering - New Mexico Tech, 2017
Awards: NSF GRFP fellowship (2019), Irving Wender fellowship (2017)
BS Chemical Engineering - Western Michigan University, 2018
Awards: NSF GRFP honorable mention (2020), PITT STRIVE scholar (2018)
MS Materials Science - Carnegie Mellon University, 2019
BE Materials Science - Beijing University of Chemical Technology, 2018
BS Chemistry, BA Physics - Temple University, 2019
Awards: PITT STRIVE scholar (2020)
Current whereabouts: Data scientist at Bloomberg (2015)
Current whereabouts: Sr. research editor at S&P global market intelligence (2018), executive director at PQI (2015)
Awards: AIChE CoMSEF graduate student award
Current whereabouts: Postdoc at Caltech (2020)
Awards: PQI graduate fellowship
Current whereabouts: Data scientist at Highmark (2018)
Awards: National Research Council postdoc
Current whereabouts: Data scientist at Brembo (2020), postdoc at NIST (2018)
Current whereabouts: CEO of Lignolix
Current whereabouts: Postdoc at Argonne National Lab
Current whereabouts: Graduate sustainability consultant at Hoare Lea
Current whereabouts: CMP engineering intern at Micron technology
Current whereabouts: ChemE BS student at Pitt
Awards: NSF GRFP fellowship (2020)
Current whereabouts: MechE PhD student at Carnegie Mellon
Current whereabouts: ChemE BS student at Clarkson University
Current whereabouts: Gas systems planning engineer at Equitrans Midstream
Current whereabouts: Epic
Current whereabouts: Gas systems planning engineer at Equitrans Midstream
Current whereabouts: Analytical chemistry PhD student at University of Delaware
Current whereabouts: Software engineer at Airbnb
Current whereabouts: Chemistry fleet support engineer at Naval Nuclear Laboratory
Current whereabouts: Quality engineer at TE connectivity
Current whereabouts: ChemE PhD student at Pitt with Dr. Mpourmpakis
Current whereabouts: PhD student at Texas Tech University
Current whereabouts: Senior data science specialist at BASF
Current whereabouts: Program manager at Williams
Current whereabouts: Co-founder of The Intellectus Group
Current whereabouts: Process automation engineer at Elanco
Current whereabouts: Chief content creator at Blawesome studio