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Theodor Agapie
Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Theodor Agapie was born in 1979 in Bucharest, Romania.  He received his B.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 2007. Upon completion of his Ph.D. he moved to University of California, Berkeley as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow. Agapie developed his passion for chemistry during high school and participated in chemistry competitions; he won two silver medals at the International Chemistry Olympiads as part of the Romanian team. While an undergraduate at MIT, he worked with Professor Christopher C. Cummins for more that three and a half years on atom and fragment transfer chemistry involving metal complexes, on titanium-ketyl radical chemistry, and on DFT computations to detail the electronic structure of synthesized complexes. At graduation, he received the Chemistry Department’s Alpha Chi Sigma Award for achievement in research, scholarship, and service to the department. At Caltech, he worked under the tutelage of Professor John E. Bercaw on mechanistic and synthetic aspects of chromium-based olefin oligomerization catalysis and on developing new early transition metal nonmetallocene olefin polymerization catalysts. His Ph.D. thesis received Caltech’s Chemistry Department Herbert Newby McCoy Award for outstanding contribution to the science of chemistry. Upon graduation, in May 2007 he moved to UC Berkeley for postdoctoral studies with Professor Michael A. Marletta. There, he focuses on mechanistic aspects of biological nitric oxide synthesis involving the metalloprotein nitric oxide synthase. Agapie will return to Caltech in early 2009 as an assistant professor of chemistry.