National Institute Of Materials Physics - Romania

GENERAL SEMINAR: Dr. Valentin-Paul Nicu, Provitam Foundation, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

About Dr. Valentin-Paul Nicu,

Valentin-Paul Nicu is a senior researcher with over 20 years of experience in computational chemistry and chiroptical spectroscopy. He is the author of the code that calculates vibrational circular dichroism spectra in the Amsterdam Density Functional (ADF) program package, and has recently introduced a novel AI-assisted chiroptical protocol for determining the absolute configuration of chiral compounds, which significantly outperforms the standard method.

He is currently a researcher at the Provitam Foundation and serves as the president of the Chirality Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy (SAS). He graduated from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Bucharest in 2001 and later earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he continued as a postdoctoral researcher and led projects funded by personal NWO grants (VENI and NCI), totaling €1,700K. Upon returning to Romania, he established a quantum chemistry laboratory fully funded through two UEFISCDI projects (TE2016 and PCE2020), which produced results published in prestigious international journals (Chem. Sci., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., JACS, Small, Nature Chemistry, and Nature) and enabled collaborations with renowned scientists such as Nicholas Kotov and Ben Feringa (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 2016).

In addition to his research activity, Dr. Nicu has taught courses at universities in Sibiu and Cluj-Napoca, and has been actively involved in promoting science among high school students. In 2024, a group of high school students he mentored received awards for scientific presentations at both national (RoBioInfo) and international (VOA8, Bochum, Germany) conferences.