Degree: Bachelor of Science with ACS Certification/Master of Arts in Chemistry (3+1)
Research Professor: Professor Ian Harrison

Biography

John Zima did research with Professor Ian Harrison where he used the Master Equation Solver for Multi-Energy Well Reactions (MESMER) in order to model the energetic relaxation of a photoexcited gas (e.g. methane) in a buffer gas (e.g. Argon) and then built a model for the energetic relaxation of the gas adsorbed on a metal surface using an analogy where the surface was effectively modelled as a bath gas.

John is an Echols Scholar and an international student from Austria. He has lived in Singapore, Switzerland and the UK before coming to UVA and is fluent in both English and German. During high school he played tennis and was interested in artificial intelligence, which led participating in Kaggle competitions. He is also interested in philosophy and attended the CTY summer program at Johns Hopkins University in the summer of 2016 for a course titled 'Logic: Principles of Reasoning'. John is doing the 3+1 Chemistry Program (and double majoring in economics) which means he will stay for another year, during which he will do research in the field of Astrochemistry with Professor Garrod, and graduate with a Masters degree in 2022. He then plans to pursue further graduate level education.