Study Subject: Theoretical Chemistry
Employer: Uppsala University
Level: PhD
Scholarship Description: This Ph.D. project belongs to the area of computational chemistry. Our group is interested both in improving the computational methods we use and in solving chemically interesting problems. The two tasks go together. The topic of the announced position is surface chemistry, especially catalysis.

Catalysis is vital for a huge number of industrial processes, as well as in the areas of clean energy and environmental chemistry: hydrogen production for fuel cells, and vehicle emission control, are two important and challenging examples of catalysed reactions. Metal oxides, which will be studied in this project, are an important type of catalyst with a great variety of tunable properties. In the form of nanoparticles they can exhibit a very high activity/reactivity but until now the coupling between their catalytic properties and the molecular-level structure and dynamics is to a large extent unknown.
The focus of the PhD project will be to find new molecular-level information and new understanding of catalytic reactions on metal oxide surfaces and nanoparticles. Theoretical calculations are needed to explore these systems since the calculations can provide unique and detailed information, not least if we can make them span sufficiently large domains in space and time to make it feasible to compare them with experimental results.
A necessary study background to be considered for this position is that you have successfully passed some basic courses relating to one or several of the following topics: chemical bonding, quantum mechanics, theoretical chemistry, computational chemistry/physics, or programming. You must hold an undergraduate or Masters degree in chemistry, physics or a related subject. We collaborate with experimentalists but this Ph.D. project itself is not planned to involve experimental work.

Scholarship Application Deadline: 15 November 2010
Further Scholarship Information and Application