Current Group Members
Prof Michelle Coote
Professor Michelle Coote is a graduate of the University of New South Wales, where she completed a B.Sc. (Hons) in industrial chemistry (1995), followed by a Ph.D. in polymer chemistry (2000). Following postdoctoral work at the University of Durham, UK, she joined the Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University in 2001, initially as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Leo Radom. She established her own research group in 2004 and was promoted to Professor in 2011. She has published extensively in the fields of polymer chemistry, radical chemistry and computational quantum chemistry, and is a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science. She has received many awards including the 2001 IUPAC prize for young scientists, the RACI Cornforth medal (2000), Rennie medal (2006) David Sangster Polymer Science and Technology Achievement Award (2010) and HG Smith medal (2016), the Le Fevre Memorial Prize of the Australian Academy of Science (2010) and the Pople Medal of the Asia-Pacific Association for Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (2015). In 2014, she was elected to the Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science, and in 2017 she was awarded a Georgina Sweet ARC Laureate Fellowship. She is also currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Contact Information
Email:michelle.coote'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61253771
Dr Lijuan Yu
Lijuan joined the Coote group in Dec 2017. She is currently a Postdoctoral fellow. Her research interests include investigating reactions mechanism through quantum mechanical calculations, e.g. ab initio, density functional theory (DFT), composite methods, quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) simulations. ect.. Now she is working on the effects of external electric field on the barrier heights of SN1 and SN2 reactions, catalytic metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), QM/MM MD simulations for enzymatic systems.
Contact Information
Email:lijuan.yu'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61254039
Dr Rhys Murphy
Rhys commenced as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof Michelle Coote’s group in March 2021, investigating the pH-switchable electrostatic catalysis of chemical reactions. He was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow 2017-2020 at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) as part of the National Deuteration Facility. This involved hydrogen-deuterium exchange to synthesise deuterium-labelled organic compounds of interest to industry and of benefit to society, and exploration of their altered properties due to the kinetic isotope effect (e.g. improved metabolic stability of drugs/radiotracers, changes to hydrogen bonding in sunscreen agents). Rhys completed his PhD in supramolecular and synthetic organic chemistry in 2016 at Flinders University, which involved the design and synthesis of porphyrin molecular receptors and examining cooperativity upon the binding of ligands. After his PhD and prior to ANSTO/NDF, he was a research chemist in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at Flinders University, synthesising small molecule enzyme inhibitors being investigated for their potential treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. Outside the laboratory, Rhys plays trumpet in a community wind band and enjoys concerts to entertain the community at local events, as well as competing in state and national band championships, and playing the Last Post at ANZAC and Remembrance Day services.
Contact Information
Email:rhys.murphy'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61254039
Mitchell Blyth
Mitchell is a PhD student at the Australian National University in Canberra. His research interests include the application of both quantum mechanics and molecular dynamics to the rational design and multi-scale modelling of bio-inspired catalysts that capitalise upon recent research into electrostatic catalysis.
Contact Information
Email:mitchell.blyth'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61250770
Alfred Fung
Alfred recently finished Honours in the Coote group in 2017 with the synthesis of novel electrostatically stabilized nitroxide agents. He now continues his time in the Coote group through his doctoral studies concerning the design and synthesis of enzyme mimics. When not in the lab, he spends his time enjoying beer/wine, listening to symphonic/ power metal, and occasionally dabbling in martial arts.
Contact Information
Email:kam.fung'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61254039
Chelsey Hammill
Chelsey is a PhD candidate in the Computer Aided Chemical Design Research Group. She recently graduated with a Bachelor of Science after completing a project on stereocontrol of methacrylate polymers via free-radical polymerisation (2016-2017). Her current honours project (2018) is primarily focussed on the electrochemical cleavage of alkoxyamines and the uses of the resultant fragmentation patterns. Her main research interests includes a combination of computational modelling and experimental work to improve understanding in both polymer and organic chemistry. She also has a profound love for elephants and happily enjoys the outdoors!
Contact Information
Email:chelsey.hammill'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61258307
Adam Mater
Adam joined the group as an undergraduate and continued in to honours. He is now a PhD student where he is using Machine Learning to to try and replicate the human approach to solving chemical problems.
Contact Information
Email:adam.mater'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61258307
Fergus Rogers
Fergus is a returning student to the ANU with a background in theoretical chemistry. He completed his honours project in 2016 under the supervision of Dr Pierre-François Loos, a former researcher at the RSC (now working at the Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse). Fergus commenced his PhD with the Coote group in 2018 after a brief spell in the workforce, and is currently exploring the redox properties and dissociation pathways of persistent radicals/initiators, for applications in polymer and or electrochemistry chemistry.
Contact Information
Email:fergus.rogers'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61253508
Catherine Simpson
Catherine joined the Coote group in 2015 and is currently a PhD student. She has a BSc in Materials Science with Honours in Chemistry from the University of Wollongong. Her previous research has included studying triplet-triplet annihilation upconversion for dye-sensitised solar cells. She is currently using QM computational methods to study the effects of electric fields on chemical reactions.
Contact Information
Email:catherine.simpson'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61253508
Longkun (Luke) Xu
Luke joined Coote group in October, 2018. He obtained bachelor's degree with a research project on synthesis of biodegradable polymers in 2015 at Qingdao Agricultural University (Qingdao, China). Then he moved to Sichuan University (Chengdu, China) to pursue master's degree and started learning computational chemistry there. His master's thesis is mainly about non-equilibrium solvation effects on charge-transfer excited state and solvent reorganization entropy. Before commencing PhD study, he worked shortly as an assistant editor for journals Materials and High-throughput of MDPI publisher in Beijing, China. A valuable experience of academic publishing was gained there. His current research interests include theoretical studies on geochemical pressure solution, electrostatics scaling factor, electrostatics catalysis in complex environment (electrochemical interface, ionic liquids) and thermocell.
Contact Information
Email:longkun.xu'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61254039
Lin Liu
Lin joined the Coote group in 2020 as a visiting PhD student. He obtained bachelor's degree in 2017 at East China University of Science and Technology. His research interests include olefin oligomerization and photochemical conversion of CO2 to dicarboxylic acids.
Contact Information
Email:lin.liu1'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61254039
Sara Tanovic
Sara completed five undergraduate research projects throughout chemistry and physics before starting her Honours with the Coote group in 2021. She is currently designing machine learning techniques to predict the chemical properties of small molecules, and is also interested in using QM computational methods to model Diels-Alder cycloaddition reactions. Outside of her studies, she enjoys reading, climbing, and working on her many cooking projects.
Contact Information
Email:u6676643'at'anu.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 61254039