Grzegorz Zając, Ph.D.

Head of the OPUS Project, NCN
e-mail: grzegorz.zajac@jcet.eu

Grzegorz obtained his PhD degree in chemical sciences in 2018 at the Faculty of Chemistry of the Jagiellonian University, under the supervision of Prof. dr hab. Małgorzata Barańska. In his doctoral thesis, he developed new methods of amplifying the Raman optical activity (ROA) signal, including the AIRROA (Aggregation-Induced Resonance Raman Optical Activity). During his postdoctoral fellowship, he worked in the group of Prof. Petr Bouř from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. where he expanded his knowledge of molecular modeling and quantum-chemical calculations of the spectroscopic properties of molecular systems. In his research, he uses chiroptical methods and theoretical calculations to study the structure and interactions of compounds of biological importance, as well as develops methods of resonance amplification of the ROA signal. He was principal investigator of two grants founded by National Science Center in Poland: Preludium and Etiuda. Since 2020, he leads the NCN OPUS18 grant at JCET, entitled “CPL and RROA probes in the study of protein structure – induction of chirality and new methods of amplifying the chiroptical signal”. In 2023, he was awarded a scholarship by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education scholarship for outstanding young scientists.

Selected recent publications

  • Zajac, G.; Kaczor, A.; Pallares Zazo, A.; Mlynarski, J.; Dudek, M.; Baranska, M. (2016). Aggregation-induced resonance raman optical activity (AIRROA): A new mechanism for chirality enhancement. The Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 120(17), 4028-4033. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcb.6b02273
  • Zajac, G; Machalska, E.; Kaczor, A.; Kessler, J.; Bouř, P.; Baranska, M. (2018). Structure of supramolecular astaxanthin aggregates revealed by molecular dynamics and electronic circular dichroism spectroscopy. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 20, 18038-18046. https://doi.org/10.1039/C8CP01742E

More: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6783-3590