DrNadia Elghobashi-Meinhardt

Nadia completed her BSc at Stanford University in 1999 with a degree in Chemistry and then moved to Berlin to complete her Masters (2001) and PhD (2005) in Theoretical Chemistry at the Free University Berlin, where she developed few-cycle femtosecond laser pulses to drive bond-selective dissociation in small molecules (advisors Prof. Jörn Manz and Prof. Leticia Gonzalez). She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Theoretical Chemistry at the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck-Society in Berlin, where she used density functional theory (DFT) to investigate hydrogen bonding in peptides. Nadia then moved to Heidelberg University to continue working in the field of computational biophysics (Prof. Jeremy C. Smith), combining quantum mechanics and molecular mechanics to investigate optical properties of retinal proteins. In 2011, with a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation, she returned to the Free University Berlin and joined the group of Prof. Ernst-Walter Knapp to continue research in the field of computational biophysics as a junior group leader. In 2019, Nadia joined Prof. Mroginski's group at the Technical University Berlin where she worked within Berlin's Excellence Cluster, Unifying Systems in Catalysis, to study catalysis in metalloenyzmes. In 2023, Nadia was awarded an Ad Astra fellowship and appointed Assistant Prof. in the School of Chemistry at UCD.