Professor Paula Diaconescu discussed her research and career path with host Rockefeller University postdoctoral researcher Toshiki Nakashige on his podcast.
Diaconescu recorded the nearly 55-minute Scientist podcast interview on September 26 at UCLA. She met Nakashige in 2015 when she visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to give a Harvard-MIT inorganic seminar. They discussed organometallic chemistry, Romanian inorganic chemists, and why Diaconescu applied to 42 graduate schools.
Scientist podcast host Nakashige is a chemical biologist and postdoctoral researcher at The Rockefeller University.
Diaconescu joined the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry department in 2005 after spending two-years as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Robert Grubbs at California Institute of Technology. She obtained her Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Cummins at Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on arene-bridged complexes of uranium. Her earlier education was completed in Romania, where she obtained her B.S. from University of Bucharest and worked on coordination complexes of transition metals and lanthanides at University Politehnica of Bucharest. Her current research efforts focus on the design of reactive metal complexes with applications to small molecule activation, organic synthesis, and polymer formation.
In addition to a Guggenheim fellowship she received in 2015, her awards and honors include the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
A co-author on over 100 research papers, Professor Diaconescu has given more than 175 presentations nationally and internationally and is an editorial board member for the journals Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers, Organometallics, iScience, and WikiJournal of Science.
To learn more about Diaconescu’s research, visit her group’s website.
