Valeria Molinero

Valeria Molinero is Distinguished Professor; Jack and Peg Simons Endowed Professor of Theoretical Chemistry; and Director of the Henry Eyring Center for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Utah. A talented computational chemist, Molinero discovered that water’s structural and thermodynamic properties can be reproduced by an atomic model with a tetrahedral bias: the mW model. She performed the first computational calculation of a growing correlation length in supercooled water. She showed that water models can display growing response functions upon supercooling without exhibiting liquid-liquid phase separation. She elucidated the role of stacking disorder in ice nucleation, identifying the entropy of mixing of cubic and hexagonal layers as its driving force, and showed that local pre-ordering of water is not needed for hyperactive antifreeze proteins to bind to ice.