Ethan French transferred to UMass Amherst in his sophomore year when all his classes were online and found a remote research position in a computational chemistry lab, a new area for him. He says he “fell more in love with chemistry as I was exposed to a part of it that I didn’t know existed.”

French works in the lab of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Zhou Lin, which focuses on the development and application of fragment-based quantum chemistry techniques. Lin praised French’s impressive progress. “He has a unique dual background in chemistry and programming, allowing him to appreciate problems in chemistry and to program theory into codes,” she says. “His projects push the frontier of quantum chemistry by accelerating existing approaches without compromising accuracy.” French’s current research involves the application of machine learning to chemistry. Most recently, he used machine learning to predict quantum mechanical properties of molecules. A time consuming process that he helped reduce from approximately 12 hours to about 90 seconds.

As a result of his work in Lin’s lab, French was the second author on a paper published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Lin expects that his ongoing work will result in at least two more publications.

“There is always more to know,” he says. “Research has also given me a chance to focus on an area of chemistry that I can now see as being a part of my career.”