Assistant Professor of Chemistry Christine Thomas has been named a 2011 Sloan Research Fellow. These two-year fellowships are awarded to early-career scientists in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Research in the Thomas laboratory focuses on the design and synthesis of new transition metal complexes to examine the fundamental interactions between different components of bifunctional catalysts with the ultimate goal of uncovering new transition-metal catalyzed bond activation processes related to renewable energy. Since starting in the Chemistry department at Brandeis in 2008, Thomas and coworkers have developed a series of bimetallic catalysts that utilize metal-metal interactions to attenuate redox potentials and promote the activation of small molecules such as hydrogen, alkyl halides, and carbon dioxide.

The Thomas lab has an energetic and talented team of researchers

Arne Ekstrom ’96, PhD ’04 and Mikhail Ershov MA ’00 were also named as 2011 Sloan Research Fellows. Ekstrom received a B.A. in Biology and Psychology from Brandeis, and after getting an M.S. at U. Arizona, returned and completed a Ph.D. in Neuroscience here in 2004, working with Michael Kahana. After a postdoc at UCLA, Arne took a position as an Assistant Professor in the Center for Neuroscience at U. California, Davis. His lab studies spatial memory using EEG and fMRI techniques. Ershov came to Brandeis from Moscow State Univ. and received an MA in Math in 2000 bofore going on to Ph.D. work at Yale and a faculty position at U. Virginia. Ershov is being recognized for research contributions to various aspects of group theory.