Advisors: Jim Davis | Arvind Ramanathan
Growing up on a hobby farm in rural Minnesota, Christian had little concept of science or the places it would take him. During the course of his bachelor’s at Elon University in North Carolina, chance circumstances led him to science, and chemistry in particular. He spent internships at RWTH Aachen in Germany and Caltech before doing his PhD at the University of California – San Diego. Currently he is a joint postdoc with Jim Davis and Arvind Ramanathan at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He spends his afternoons driving his car around, his evenings playing competitive soccer or tennis, and his nights getting sucked deeper and deeper into the house/techno/trance rabbit hole.
Christian did his initial training in quantum chemistry, and has published two articles in that realm. From those beginnings he moved on to Newtonian mechanics methods, and has published in molecular dynamics, Markov state models, protein structure predictions, elastic network models, and Brownian dynamics. He is currently working on molecular dynamics simulations and large language model predictions for vaccine development. He particularly enjoys the creativity which can be found in research, and applying that creativity to basic or applied research problems that have some connection to saving the world.
