Aleksandra Vojvodic
Rosenbluth Associate Professor
Contact
Email: alevoj@seas.upenn.edu
Research Website | Publications
About
Dr. Aleksandra Vojvodic is the Rosenbluth Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Director of Penn Institute of Computational (PICS) Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been recognized as the Trottier Foundation Fellow both in Accelerated Decarbonization and Bio-inspired-solar-energy, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Fellow, and was chosen as one of the “Women Scientists at the Forefront of Energy Research”. She is the recipient of the Mellichamp Distinguished Lecture, Young Innovator Award in NanoEnergy, the European Federation of Catalysis Societies (EFCATS) Young Researcher Award and of the MIT Technology Review 35 Award which recognized her work and innovative approaches and identified her as “[a] computation whiz that speeds up the search for catalysts that will make green chemistry possible”. She has published more than 90 papers in journals including Science, Energy & Environmental Science, Nature Materials, Nature Energy, Nature Communications. She is Associate Editor for ACS Catalysis. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, she was a staff scientist at the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where she led a group conducting research on oxide surface reactivity. She was the Swedish Research Council postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and at the Center for Atomic-scale Materials Design at Technical University of Denmark. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from the Department of Applied Physics at Chalmers University of Technology and her Master of Science in Physics from Lund University in Sweden.
Research Interests
The Vojvodic Lab research focuses on theoretical and computational-driven materials design. The lab uses computational frameworks to obtain fundamental understanding of surface and interface properties of complex materials that can be used to develop theoretical models for chemical transformations and energy conversion. These models have, for example, been used to predict new materials for several chemical reactions which have been experimentally synthesized and tested, validating the desired properties of the computationally predicted catalyst material. The Vojvodic lab mission is to contribute with cutting-edge modern first principle tools and machine learning to help find and engineer future materials and chemistries needed for a better existence on planet Earth.
Research Areas
Catalysis and Reaction Engineering; Energy and Environmental Engineering; Molecular Simulation and Thermodynamics
Educational Background
Ph.D.: Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden (2010)
M.Sc.: Lund University, Lund, Sweden (2004)
Awards
2024-2025 Fellow in Accelerated Decarbonization, CIFAR
2022-2024 Trottier Family Foundation Fellow in Accelerated Decarbonization
2022 Penn Fellow
2020-2021 Trottier Family Foundation Fellow in Bio-inspired Solar Energy
2020 Women Scientists at the Forefront of Energy Research
2019 Mellichamp Distinguished Lecture, Georgia Tech
2019 Nano Research Young Innovators Award in NanoEnergy
2017 European Federation of Catalysis Societies (EFCATS) Young Researcher Award
2017 Scialog Fellow, Advanced Energy Storage
2016 MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35
2016-2020 Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Fellow: Bio-inspired Solar Energy