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Assistant professor receives NSF CAREER Award


Dmitri Kilin in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry has received an NSF CAREER Award.

Dmitri Kilin, NDSU assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, recently was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Kilin’s work focuses on understanding and predicting the control of photoreactions (chemical reactions driven by light) that use specialized lasers. His award will offer an environment for others to create new computational tools that will give researchers the ability to work towards higher efficiency solar cells.

Throughout the last decade, Kilin has researched and published extensively about photovoltaics and photoreactions. Photovoltaic effects occur when light is absorbed by a material and causes its electrons to be excited and moved to a higher-energy state while still contained in the material. The relationship between the structure of active materials and efficiency of the photo-induced charge transfer across the interface is an on-going quest.

Kilin defines his work as working to solve the world's energy problems by providing free and clean solar power. "Think about a small area of a desert, perhaps 100 miles square, that is populated by 100 percent efficient solar cells," he said. "While the solar power collected by these cells would amount to a very small fraction of the entire solar energy received by the Earth, it could theoretically provide all the energy needed for the globe and replace all fossil fuel and nuclear power using only solar power."

Kilin notes the underlying problem is how to make solar power more efficient given that today's panels operate at only 10 percent efficiency with a current physical limit of about 33 percent single-cell efficiency. His research funded by the NSF CAREER award will involve creating software to allow other researchers to study photoreactions in a computational environment that is free from restraints of the physical world.

As a complement to his work on photovoltaic and photocatalytic solar energy conversion, Kilin has also studied the photoinduced processes at the interfaces of metal and semiconductor nanomaterials. His research has focused on theory and computational modeling of photo-induced dynamic processes of charge transfer, non-radiative charge carrier relaxation and surface reactions at catalytic sites, as well as photo-degradation and photo-polymerization reactions.

The last two problems and his novel methods to model them were highlighted by the NSF in the CAREER Award as filling the gap in both applied and methodology directions.

The son of a physicist and practicing scientist, Kilin considers his father a role model who showed him the value of passion and a dedication to research. Kilin earned his master’s degree from Belarus State University in Belarus and his doctorate from the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. Following that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oregon, University of Washington, and University of Florida.

For his NSF CAREER Award, Kilin plans to fill gaps in the computational investigation of laser-driven chemical reactions and thus improve understanding of basic processes and accuracy for predicting outcome of a reactions at extreme conditions while reducing costs and establishing standard approaches. The software he and his team will create will be able to predict and interpret the products of various reactions, helping advance technologies that include energy conversion and storage and chemical sensing.

One important potential result of his research will be the optimization of thin-film fabrication/deposition/growth technology that is important to the miniaturization of electronic circuits on both a nano and sub-nano scale.

While Kilin enjoys his work as a researcher, it's clear where his passion lies when he speaks of working with his students. "The size of NDSU is perfect for working directly with graduate students, so I always look for opportunities to attract them to our programs at NDSU. I tell potential students that a benefit of coming to our program is working directly with research faculty," Kilin said.

Kilin’s NSF CAREER Award includes an educational mission that supports and outreach activities and programs. It specifically addresses the needs of North Dakota tribal college students via the Nurturing American Tribal Undergraduate Research and Education, known as NATURE, program and provides opportunities for high school students participating in the Parents Involvement with Children, Nurturing Intellectual Curiosity in Science, known as PICNICS, program hosted at NDSU.

CAREER awardees at NDSU have received more than $12 million in grants to conduct research in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, civil and electrical engineering, computer science, pharmaceutical sciences, plant sciences, coatings and polymeric materials, and veterinary and microbiological sciences.

Kilin’s research, titled "Investigation of Laser-driven Chemical Reactions by Molecular Dynamics," is funded by Award No. 1944921 from the National Science Foundation.

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Last Updated: Tuesday, August 01, 2023 11:27:59 AM
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