Marquette chemistry professor Babikov named Young Scholar

Dr. Dmitri Babikov, assistant professor of chemistry and resident of Brookfield, was one of four junior faculty members honored with the 2008 Young Scholar Award by Marquette University’s Helen Way Klingler College of Arts & Sciences at the Annual Distinguished Scholars Reception. The awards of up to $32,000 are intended to fund $2,000 in operating costs and cover up to 50 percent of salary to afford the recipient a one-semester sabbatical.

Babikov, who completed his doctoral work in 1998 at the Laboratory of Atomic and Molecular Collisions in Orsay, France, specializes in theoretical/physical chemistry and molecular physics. Although his research involves the tiniest of scales, the application of that work affects the entire planet. In his theoretical physical chemistry and molecular physics research, he studies chemical processes on an atomic scale, modeling elementary events of reactions, predicting outcomes of molecular collisions and properties of new molecules.

Before joining the Marquette faculty in 2004, received a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a postdoctoral Research Associate at Argonne National Laboratory. He earned his B.S. degree in 1993 and his M.S. degree in 1995 from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia.

“One of my research projects focuses on the reaction that forms ozone,” said Babikov. “Ozone is an important component of Earth’s atmosphere that we must preserve in the stratosphere -- keeping the ‘ozone hole’ from getting bigger -- while preventing human-caused tropospheric ozone, the main component of smog.”

The theoretical nature of Babikov’s work is crucial when experiments are impossible or insufficient for understanding chemical processes. He carries out such state-of-the-art calculations using some of the world’s fastest parallel supercomputers.

“The recipients of the Way Klingler Young Scholar Awards were selected because of their contributions to research and their potential for outstanding future research,” said Dr. William Wiener, vice provost for research and dean of the graduate school.