Team
Principal Investigator
Dr. Farnaz Heidar-Zadeh 🇨🇦 🇮🇷
Assistant Professor in Theoretical & Computational Chemistry
Bruce Mitchell Research Chair at Carbon to Metal Coating Institute (C2MCI)
Bruce Mitchell Research Chair at Carbon to Metal Coating Institute (C2MCI)
Department of Chemistry, Queen's University, Canada
Farnaz is interested in the design of molecules with desirable properties using scientific computing and data-driven approaches. Her passion for research and education led to her being recognized as a 2024 Cottrell-Scholar for the quality and innovation of her research and teaching program. Read More
Current Team Members
Dr. Fanwang Meng 🇨🇳
NSERC Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2024)
Fanwang focuses on developing computational drug discovery workflows and open-source software packages.
Omid Hosseinzadeh 🇮🇷
Bruce Mitchell Doctoral Research Fellow (2025)
Omid combines conceptual quantum chemistry and machine learning to develop augmented force field models for simulating biomolecules and gold nanoclusters.
Neeladitya Chowdhury 🇮🇳
Ph.D. Student (2026)
Neeladitya develops and studies distributed multipole analysis methods to improve description of molecular electrostatics for simulating biomolecules.
Negar Molavi 🇮🇷
M.Sc. Student (2025)
Negar characterizes excited-state properties of gold nanoclusters and integrates these results with data-driven approaches for the design and discovery of novel compounds for cancer therapeutics.
Olivia Saur 🇨🇦 🇫🇷
Mathematics Undergraduate Researcher (2025) | C2MCI Summer Outreach and Research Fellow (2025)
Olivia applies optimization techniques to design gold nanoclusters with desired photophysical properties.
Ellie MacKinnon 🇨🇦
Engineering-Chemistry Undergraduate Thesis Student (2025)
Ellie studies how atomic properties vary across different chemical environments to identify methods that improve transferability and distinguishability.
Emily Machel 🇨🇦
STEMInA Research Experience Program Student (2025)
Emily is learning about foundations of computational chemistry and studies how atomic properties vary across protein fragments.
Ava Bagherichimeh 🇨🇦 🇮🇷
Biochemistry Undergraduate Research Volunteer (2025)
Ava is learning about foundations of computational chemistry and performing data analysis to identify trends in chemical data.
Looking for past group members? Visit the Alumni page.