Chowdhury Ashraf

UW Chemical Engineering

Chowdhury is a postdoctoral research associate in Chemical Engineering at University of Washington, where his research focuses on developing chemical kinetic models for high temperature biomass conversion and discovering reaction mechanisms of complex chemical processes. He is developing an open source python package to model reaction kinetics and optimize the associated reaction rate parameters by fitting experimental observations through stochastic global optimization methods.

Chowdhury obtained his PhD from The Pennsylvania State University where he used reactive molecular dynamics simulations to study combustion chemistry and epoxy polymerization. His research also focused on performing quantum chemical calculations for gas phase chemistry and optimizing reactive force fields via active training. He also obtained an MS degree where he focused on developing efficient algorithms for time adaptive stochastic simulations of water droplet growth by coalescence.

Chowdhury’s research goals involve developing a machine learning model to predict reaction pathways for a given set of reactants and products and develop novel materials for battery application through data driven approach.