The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Ilsa Cooke as an Assistant Professor in the area of experimental physical chemistry with a focus on astrochemistry. She will join the department January 1st , 2022.
Dr. Cooke completed her PhD in Physical Chemistry at the University of Virginia, where she used laboratory experiments to constrain thermal and photon-induced processes in interstellar ices. During this time, she worked as a visiting researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics investigating ice diffusion processes and photochemistry. She is currently completing a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Physics at the University of Rennes in France where she is exploring low-temperature gas-phase kinetics of reactions relevant to astrochemistry using various techniques.
The Cooke group at UBC will focus on using laboratory surface and gas-phase experiments to unravel the formation of molecules in interstellar space.