Hirata group alumnus Dr. Olaseni Sode (PhD, 2012) has been named one of a highly selective group of recipients of the prestigious Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences.

Olaseni Sode received his B.Sc. in Chemistry and his B.A. in French from Morehouse College in 2006. He received his Ph.D. in 2012 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he helped develop and implement fragmentation methods for modern electronic and vibrational structure theories directly applicable to a class of solids known as molecular crystals. Specifically, he studied the energies, structures and phonon spectra of high-dimensional systems such as solid hydrogen fluoride, solid carbon dioxide and ice Ih. He joined Professor Voth’s group at the University of Chicago in October 2012.