PNAS recently published a profile on our very own Professor, Valeria Molinero. In this profile PNAS not only discusses Molinero’s research but how she came to love chemistry: “Growing up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Valeria Molinero nursed an early love of learning and discovery, thanks to her parents. ‘When I encountered the natural sciences in school, I started liking them all,” she says. “And then I saw chemistry, and I liked it, and I decided to just study chemistry,’ says Molinero.”

The profile also discusses her research here at the U, “At the University of Utah, Molinero also started studying the crystallization of water, particularly the interplay between crystallization and structural changes in supercooled water. “At this point, I’m well-known for phase transitions and crystallization, but I had not done any crystallization before I got to Utah, and even said at one point, ‘I will never do crystallization,’” she says. Among other findings, she was able to decipher some of the factors controlling the crystallization of water into ice. “We showed through molecular simulations with the model I have developed that when the structure of water changes the most, the crystallization rate of water is the maximum,” says Molinero. “We predicted a maximum crystallization rate in real water at around 225 Kelvin, and indeed, it was found in experiments later to be at 228 Kelvin or so,” she says.”

Read the full profile here!