Current Group Members


Liang Shi
Liang Shi
Principal Investigator
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.


Hanbo Hong
Hanbo Hong
Graduate Student
Email: hhong11@ucmerced.edu
Room: ACS 208D

Hanbo joined the group in fall 2018. He received his B.E. from South China University of Technology (SCUT) in 2016, specialized in Polymer Materials and Engineering under Prof. Xiaoping Wang’s supervision, and then completed M.S. in Material Science in the University of Southern California (USC). He is currently interested in modelling novel vibrational and electronic spectroscopy for complex systems, e.g. vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) for proteins, and two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES) for organic dyes.


Katherine Donahoe
Katherine Donahoe
Graduate Student
Email: kdonahoe@ucmerced.edu
Room: ACS 208D

Kat joined the group in Spring 2023. She received a B.S. in Chemistry from California State University, Los Angeles in 2010. In 2017, she received an M.S. in Analytical Chemistry from Washington State University, where she worked on mass spectrometry instrument development in the Reilly group. She is currently working on mixed QM/MM methods for modeling and understanding solvent dynamics and their manifestation in optical spectroscopy.


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

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.

Group Alumni


Bowen Han - Graduate Student
Fall 2018 - Spring 2023


Matthew Ferreyra - Undergraduate Student
Summer 2022 - Spring 2023


Shao-Yu Lu - Postdoctoral Scholar
Fall 2019 - Spring 2023


Yue Yu - Postdoctoral Scholar
Spring 2019 - Fall 2021


Jacqueline Leon - Undergraduate Student
Spring 2020 - Fall 2021


Daniel Valenzuela - Undergraduate Student
Summer 2020 - Fall 2020


Gabriel Zepeda - Undergraduate Student
Summer 2020 - Fall 2020


Nhu Kim - Undergraduate Student
Fall 2019 - Spring 2020


Jiehui (Wendy) Liao - Undergraduate Student
Summer 2019 - Spring 2020


Nasier Muldrow - ACS SEED Student
Summer 2019


Giordan Clutario - Undergraduate Student
Fall 2017 - Summer 2018


Antony Shenny - Undergraduate Student
Spring 2017 - Summer 2018


Yvette Carrillo - ACS SEED Student
Summer 2018


Mario Cop - Undergraduate Student
Spring 2017 - Fall 2017


Aaron Bettencourt - ACS SEED Student
Summer 2017


Bhonesa Kirpal - Undergraduate Student
Spring 2017