Biography:Heather Kulik

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Short description: American physicist
Heather J. Kulik
Alma materCooper Union B.E. (2004)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D. (2009)
Scientific career
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
ThesisFirst-principles transition-metal catalysis : efficient and accurate approaches for studying enzymatic systems (2009)
Doctoral advisorNicola Marzari
Other academic advisorsJudith Klinman, Todd Martinez
Websitehjkgrp.mit.edu

Heather J. Kulik is an American computational materials scientist and engineer who is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research considers the computational design of new materials and the use of artificial intelligence to predict material properties.

Early life and education

Kulik earned her bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering at Cooper Union in 2004. She moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for her graduate studies, where she joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and worked under the supervision of Nicola Marzari.[1] During her doctoral research, she introduced a Hubbard U term to density functional theory calculations, which improved the study of transition metal complexes.[2] Density functional theory allows for the prediction and study of new materials with limited computational cost. Amongst these materials, Kulik concentrated on transition metal complexes, as their highly localized electrons make the unphysical decollimation that occurs in the simplifications of DFT inappropriate.[2] She graduated in 2009 with her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering.

Kulik then conducted postdoctoral research with Felice Lightstone at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She then worked alongside Todd Martínez at Stanford University and Judith Klinman at the University of California, Berkeley on the large-scale electronic structures of biomolecules.[3]

Research and career

In 2013, Kulik joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Joseph R. Mares Career Development Chair.[3] She specializes in computational modeling and artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials and catalysts. In particular, Kulik develops new strategies to improve the accuracy of density functional theory.[4][5]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 "Novartis Early Career Award: K. L. Hull / Leipziger Universitätsmedaille: E. Hey-Hawkins / Karl Ziegler Guest Professorship: K. Nozaki / Clara Immerwahr Award: M. Escudero-Escribano / Marion Milligan Mason Awards: V. E. Ferry, S. K. Fullerton, L. C. Hsiao, H. J. Kulik, C. S. Schindler". Angewandte Chemie International Edition 58 (10): 2940–2941. 2019. doi:10.1002/anie.201900118. ISSN 1521-3773. PMID 30680909. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201900118. 
  2. 2.0 2.1 Kulik, Heather J (2009). First-principles transition-metal catalysis: efficient and accurate approaches for studying enzymatic systems (Thesis). OCLC 428134616.
  3. 3.0 3.1 "Joseph R. Mares '24 Career Development Professor in Chemical Engineering". https://csbphd.mit.edu/faculty/heather-j-kulik. 
  4. "hjkgrp.mit.edu | Kulik group at MIT". http://hjkgrp.mit.edu/. 
  5. "Resnick | Symposium". https://archive.resnick.caltech.edu/symposium2018-kulik.php. 
  6. "Heather Kulik featured as I&ECR 2017 Class of Influential Researchers – MIT Chemical Engineering" (in en-US). https://cheme.mit.edu/news-post/heather-kulik-featured-as-iecr-2017-class-of-influential-researchers/. 
  7. Savage, Phillip E. (2017-09-27). "Announcing the 2017 Class of Influential Researchers". Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 56 (38): 10515. doi:10.1021/acs.iecr.7b03758. ISSN 0888-5885. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.iecr.7b03758. 
  8. 8.0 8.1 "Heather Kulik earns DARPA Director's Fellowship – MIT Chemical Engineering" (in en-US). https://cheme.mit.edu/heather-kulik-darpa-fellowship/. 
  9. "Meet the 2019 Recipients of The Journal of Physical Chemistry and PHYS Division Lectureship Awards" (in en-US). 2019-07-02. https://axial.acs.org/2019/07/02/meet-the-2019-recipients-of-the-journal-of-physical-chemistry-and-phys-division-lectureship-awards/. 
  10. "Heather Kulik wins the 2019 NSF CAREER Award – MIT Chemical Engineering" (in en-US). https://cheme.mit.edu/news-post/heather-kulik-wins-the-2019-nsf-career-award/. 
  11. "AAAS Marion Milligan Mason Award Recipients | American Association for the Advancement of Science" (in en). https://www.aaas.org/awards/mason-award/recipients. 
  12. "Saville Lectures | Chemical and Biological Engineering". https://cbe.princeton.edu/events/saville. 
  13. "Eight from MIT named 2021 Sloan Research Fellows" (in en). https://news.mit.edu/2021/eight-from-mit-named-sloan-research-fellows-0219.