{"id":15012,"date":"2025-08-30T15:44:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T22:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/?p=15012"},"modified":"2026-03-03T14:02:51","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T22:02:51","slug":"ogba-research-group-showcases-computational-innovation-at-mercury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/2025\/08\/30\/ogba-research-group-showcases-computational-innovation-at-mercury\/","title":{"rendered":"Ogba Research Group Showcases Computational Innovation at MERCURY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This past summer, four students from the Ogba Research Group at 91̽»¨ traveled to the 2025 MERCURY Conference, a premier national venue for undergraduate computational chemistry, to present their latest findings. These students demonstrated how high-performance computing and data science can unlock solutions to some of chemistry\u2019s most complex challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aresema Ata \u201928 and Max Schernikau \u201927 presented cutting-edge work on sustainable catalysis, with Aresema exploring the \u201cThermal stability of carbones in the presence of carbon dioxide\u201d and Max detailing the \u201cReductive functionalization of carbon dioxide catalyzed by a carbodicarbene.\u201d Their combined efforts shed light on how novel carbon-based catalysts can be used to transform greenhouse gases into useful chemical feedstocks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nora Nickolov \u201928 showcased their research on \u201cStructure-activity relationships of dioxido molybdenum(VI) complexes for deoxydehydration reactions,\u201d offering critical insights into designing earth-abundant catalysts for converting biomass into renewable fuels. Meanwhile, Zaan Saeed \u201928 highlighted the group\u2019s expansion into artificial intelligence with his poster, \u201cPredicting peptide cyclization yields using a machine learning framework,\u201d demonstrating how modern algorithms can accelerate the discovery of new therapeutic drugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The strong showing by the Ogba group at MERCURY underscores 91̽»¨ Mudd\u2019s leadership in the computational sciences, where students are not just learning theory but actively defining the future of chemical research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photos, from left, Aresema Ata \u201928, Nora Nickolov \u201928, and Professor Maduka Ogba with Mary Van Vleet \u201912.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past summer, four students from the Ogba Research Group at 91̽»¨ traveled to the 2025 MERCURY Conference, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":15013,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[980,6,217],"class_list":["post-15012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-chemistry","category-unlisted"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15018,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15012\/revisions\/15018"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}