Thomas Mcfadden, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

One attribute I am known for is my willingness and ability to learn new concepts and skills. I work very well in a group environment but I am also comfortable as a leader. I was President of the Graduate Student Association at UofM for the Deparment of Chemistry for two years. My background includes physical-organic, organometallic, and computational chemistry. I am an expert at nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), ultra-violet-visible (UV-Vis), and vibrational/Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. I am also competent at collecting and analyzing Raman and rotational spectroscopy. I have 4 years of experience using gas-chromatography and liquid-chromatography mass-spectrometry (GC-MS and LC-MS, respectively). I was awarded a Ph.D. in May 2022 for Organic Chemistry, however, my experience is much more diverse. I have 10 years of experience in organic synthesis, 8 years in organometallic (manganese, chromium, tungsten, and others) and metalloid (silicon and germanium) synthesis, and a large repertoire of purification techniques including different types of chromatography, recrystallization, sublimation, and separation of species at reduced pressure along a temperature gradient to name a few. I have been using air-free (Schlenk) techniques for 8 years. Perhaps the pinnacle of my chemistry education was the characterization of organometallic photochromes at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on the picosecond timescale using time-resolved infrared spectroscopy (TRIR). I am an avid computational chemist and have access to an HPC cluster at the College of Charleston where I work as an Adjunct Professor while conducting research with Prof. Gamil A. Guirgis, but I also use the two workstations at my home. I am an expert at using Gaussian for a multitude of calculations in the ground state for reaction transition states and mapping conformational changes, excited state molecular properties, predicting numerous types of spectra, and I am well-versed in Natural Bond Orbital (NBO) Theory developed by the Weinhold group. NBO theory is an esoteric quantum chemical method, with a rigorous mathematical foundation, that can be used for extracting information from the wave equation for a molecule where insights into electronic structure can be achieved. I have access to all available NBO software packages by Weinhold et al.I am currently learning to use the programs LAMMPS, GROMACS, and GAMESS right now, and I hope to become proficient at navigating Linux and coding in Python in the next several months.