Dr Adam Kirrander appointed Fellow and Tutor in Chemistry at St Peter’s College

St Peter’s College is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Adam Kirrander as Fellow and Tutor in Chemistry. Dr Kirrander will teach physical chemistry to undergraduates and looks forward to engaging with graduate students in the College.

Dr Kirrander studied biophysics at Uppsala University in Sweden, followed by MSc and DPhil studies in theoretical chemistry at Oxford. His credentials include a postdoc in the experimental group of Prof Helen Fielding at University College London (UCL) and later a fellowship at Laboratoire Aimé Cotton (CNRS) working on theoretical high-resolution spectroscopy and coherent control with Dr Christian Jungen. After this, he spent one year as a visiting scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, then started his own research group in Edinburgh. He has diverse teaching experience, having previously taught chemistry students in Edinburgh and UCL, engineering students in Uppsala, mathematics students in Cape Town (at AIMS), and physics students in Paris.

His research focuses on the application of new light and electron sources to image dynamic processes in atoms and molecules. Much of this work is theoretical, examining the basic physics of experiments and developing new simulation methods for quantum dynamics, but his group also participates in experiments at facilities around the world. ‘In several instances,’ he notes, ‘our theoretical work has driven the development of novel experimental techniques and methods.’

Dr Kirrander’s research group has had their work published in leading journals such as Nature Chemistry, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their research has been highlighted by the US Department of Energy in a list of 75 breakthroughs to emerge from US National Laboratories in their 75 years of existence, and they were awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Prize in 2021.

To learn more about Dr Kirrander, visit his College profile.