Current Group Members

Liang Shi
Associate Professor
Email: lshi4@ucmerced.edu
Phone: 209-201-2409
Room: ACS 219

Liang received his B.S. degree in Chemistry in 2009 from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and did undergraduate research with Prof. Yao Fu. He then moved to Madison WI, and received his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2014 under the supervision of Prof. James Skinner. After doing a postdoc with Prof. Adam Willard at MIT, he started his independent career at UC Merced in 2016. He is interested in developing and applying models to understand structure, dynamics, and spectroscopy of heterogeneous molecular systems.

Chamikara Karunasena
Postdoctoral Scholar
Email: ckarunasena@ucmerced.edu
Room: ACS 213

Chamikara earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Kentucky. His doctoral research focused on the development of synthetic organic materials via multiscale computational modeling and simulations. His expertise are in classical molecular dynamics with enhanced sampling techniques, quantum chemical calculations, and both theoretical and experimental X-ray spectroscopic methods. He is currently pursuing postdoctoral research on the development of hybrid electro-optic materials under the joint supervision of Dr. Christine Isborn and Dr. Liang Shi. His Github can be found here.

Donglin Yang
Graduate Student
Email: dyang83@ucmerced.edu
Room: ACS 208D

Donglin joined the group in Spring 2026. She earned her B.E. in Textile Sciences and Engineering from Tiangong University in 2021. She then received her M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Duke University in 2024, where she worked on the self-assembly behavior of polymer-grafted nanoparticles using molecular dynamics and dissipative particle dynamics simulations. Her current research centers on water model assessment and nuclear quantum effects.

Gunnar Carlson
Graduate Student
Email: gcarlson2@ucmerced.edu
Room: ACS 208A

Gunnar joined the group in Spring 2024. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Chemistry from Western Washington University with his thesis focusing on method development of a constrained density functional tight binding followed by a configuration interaction in order to compute electronic couplings. He is interested in the application of machine learning in computing these couplings.