Welcome!

I am Aditya Nandy, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) at UCLA.

I am a theorist / computationalist. My interests lie in understanding how materials and biological systems undergo reactivity or respond to external perturbations. My goal is to understand the behavior of these systems across multiple time and length scales, to understand how microscopic interactions or behavior may lead to phenomena at the mesoscale. My research is at the intersection of quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics, continuum mechanics, and data science. I use tools from both applied mathematics and machine learning to solve these chemical / biophysical problems. I am interested in these phenomena for both biological systems (i.e. proteins / RNAs) and materials systems (i.e. porous materials and transition metal complexes).

About Me

I joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA as an Assistant Professor in July 2025. Prior to joining UCLA, I earned my B.S. in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, I was an experimental solid-state NMR spectroscopist, working with Prof. Jeffrey A. Reimer on metal-organic frameworks. As a graduate student, I switched fields and obtained my Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry from MIT in 2023 where I was trained by Prof. Heather J. Kulik , studying transition metal complexes and metal-organic frameworks using quantum chemical and data driven methods. After my Ph.D., I moved towards studying biological systems. I was a Schmidt AI+Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, where I was trained jointly by Prof. Benoît Roux, Prof. Eduardo Perozo, and Prof. Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan. My postdoctoral research focused on bridging atomistic membrane protein models with continuum cellular models to understand mechanics of hearing. Outside of science, I enjoy taking long walks, visiting coffee shops, talking with friends, and cooking.