Recently graduated senior Hrishikesh Ram (B.S. ’25) was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship! Hrishi will attend graduate school at the University of California–Berkeley in the fall to pursue a Ph.D. in physical chemistry.

The fellowship provides outstanding opportunities to students pursuing doctoral degrees in fields that use high-performance computing to solve complex science and engineering problems. The program fosters a community of energetic and committed Ph.D. students, alumni, DOE laboratory staff and scientists who want to have an impact on the nation while advancing their research.

Since 2021, Hrishi has been working in Prof. Phil Westmoreland’s group, using the tools of theoretical and computational chemistry to understand the kinetics and thermochemistry of PFAS incineration. In addition to his research at NC State, he has also spent time at Argonne National Lab and NIST, working on related problems in fluorocarbon chemistry and polymer physics. 

Hrishi’s research proposals involved the use of a high-throughput, automated computational approach to curating a chemically-accurate dataset of reaction barrier heights for fluorocarbon thermal oxidation, and subsequently developing deep learning models capable of predicting barrier heights given appropriate molecular representations and descriptors. Successful models would accelerate graph-based approaches to chemical reaction network expansion while improving accuracy in predicted thermochemical kinetics used in gauging convergence. 

This fellowship comes as the latest recognition for Hrishi. He has published multiple first-author peer-reviewed papers, presented at conferences, received the 2024 George H. Markstein Best Presentation Award at the U.S. National Combustion Meeting, and was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (which he turned down in order to accept the DOE fellowship). “It is remarkable for a senior to graduate with three first-author papers plus more in review or in preparation, but that’s Hrishi,” says Prof. Westmoreland.

Congratulations on this remarkable achievement, Hrishi! We cannot wait to see what you do next.