Dr. Parvathi Krishnakumar

Dr. Parvathi Krishnakumar obtained her PhD degree from Homi Bhabha National Institute, India where her doctoral work involved the in-silico study of structure, properties and interactions of molecular hydrated clusters. Parvathi is  presently working as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow through the PMTC at the University of Limerick where her research involves applying state of the art computational modelling techniques and informatics tools to speed up material's discovery, selection and optimization.

Recently developed SAFT-gamma-mie methodology is an exciting new group contribution approach to the estimation of physico-chemical properties of chemicals. The key to the successful use of this methodology involves the ability to estimate parameters of contributing groups in a molecule. This remains a challenge, given the immense diversity in chemistries found in these molecules. Parvathi's current work aims at exploring a hybrid solution, combining the accuracy of quantum level predictions with computational simplicity of group-contribution methods, to the application of SAFT-gamma-mie method for a new molecule.

The goal of the project is to make a method that is transferable and can be applied to make predictions across many types of molecules that have not yet been experimentally tested. Parvathi's research is supported by Dr. Damien Thompson and Eli Lilly.