Rate My Professor Andrew Tarzia

Dr. Andrew Tarzia is an Assistant Professor of Computational Chemistry for Synthesis & Materials within the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham, a position he assumed in August 2025. He completed his BSc in Chemistry and Theoretical Physics with first-class Honours in Chemistry in 2014 and his PhD in Chemistry in 2019 at the University of Adelaide, Australia, supervised by David Huang and Christian Doonan with support from CSIRO and additional supervision from Aaron Thornton. During his PhD, he developed high-throughput screening methods for metal-organic frameworks. Subsequently, Tarzia was a postdoctoral researcher in Kim Jelfs’ Materials Group at Imperial College London from 2019 to 2022, focusing on software and methods for screening coordination cages and molecular materials. In May 2022, he joined the Pavan Lab at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, first as a postdoc and then as a fixed-term assistant professor (RTD-a) from December 2022 to August 2025, funded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and the EU, working on rational design of supramolecular materials.

Tarzia utilizes high-throughput computational chemistry and physics-based models to predict the structures and supramolecular properties of self-assembled cages. His research interests encompass developing algorithms to efficiently explore self-assembly structural outcomes from experimental inputs, implementing high-throughput methodologies for predicting supramolecular properties to design catalysts and sensors, and creating automated multiscale workflows to optimize computational decision-making. He prioritizes robust open-source software that bridges experimental and computational workflows, thereby minimizing materials discovery costs and broadening access to advanced computational methods. Notable publications include "Systematic exploration of accessible topologies of cage molecules via minimalistic models" (Chemical Science, 2023, with Wolpert, Jelfs, and Pavan), "A Combined Experimental and Computational Exploration of Heteroleptic cis-Pd₂L₂L'₂ Coordination Cages through Geometric Complementarity" (Chemistry: A European Journal, 2025), "Unlocking the computational design of metal-organic cages" (Chemical Communications, 2022), "High-throughput computational evaluation of low symmetry Pd₂L₄ cages to aid in system design" (Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2021), and "Diastereoselective Self-Assembly of Low-Symmetry PdₙL₂ₙ Nanocages through Coordination-Sphere Engineering" (Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2023). His contributions relate to UN Sustainable Development Goals 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) and 13 (Climate Action).