As Rice University prepares to celebrate the Class of 2025 at commencement May 9-10, Rice News is spotlighting a series of soon-to-be graduates:
For Thiago Pinheiro dos Santos, a doctoral candidate in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Brazil, research is a way to drive positive, meaningful impact across a wide range of real-world domains from energy innovation to medicine. His work at Rice focused on molecular-level drug design and applications of computational modeling in biophysics and medicine, drawing on expertise in thermodynamics, statistical mechanical theory and classical and quantum computational simulations. A recipient of the Riki Kobayashi Fellowship, the Ken Kennedy Institute Fellowship and the Future Faculty Fellowship, dos Santos has thrived in Rice’s collaborative and culturally rich community. After graduation, he will join Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a postdoctoral research associate, contributing to projects in the chemical separations research group, which addresses challenges such as recovering critical materials, recycling used nuclear fuel, desalination, carbon dioxide capture, waste treatment and more.
Video by Brandon Martin.