Patryk Tomasz Kozlowski

About Patryk Tomasz Kozlowski

Patryk Kozlowski was born and raised in Orange County, California, to parents who fled martial law in Poland in 1981. His mother, who grew up backpacking in the Polish Carpathian Mountains, instilled in him a love for nature through family camping trips to California’s national parks. His father, following in the footsteps of Patryk’s grandfather, a Polish mining engineer commissioned to work in developing countries across the globe, studied at UC Irvine (along with Patryk’s mother) to become an engineer of computers. From his mother, Patryk learned to appreciate the beauty of nature, and from his father, he became aware that, in the past unbeknownst, humanity was destroying it, by producing its energy with fossil fuels.

As a child, Patryk attended Polish Saturday school, only skipping class for junior tennis tournaments. He later attended Caltech, where he was a student-athlete on the intercollegiate tennis team. Initially undecided about his major, he was fascinated by his freshman general chemistry class, where he learned how the geometry of electron orbits determines global chemical properties. This led him to join Professor Ryan Hadt’s physical inorganic chemistry lab, where he investigated the coupling of molecular vibrations to electron spin for applications in molecular qubits using computer simulations. His work was published in the Journal of Chemical Physics.

Patryk became interested in quantum chemistry, the field that develops such simulations from the underlying quantum physics principles. Thus, he joined Professor Garnet Chan’s quantum chemistry research group. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he conducted remote research on improving simulations of catalysis, which enables sustainable chemical production, culminating in a first-author publication in the Caltech Undergraduate Research Journal. Midway through his junior year, Patryk was diagnosed with leukemia and subsequently suffered a stroke. A week afterwards, while bedbound and unable to communicate, he was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics. After a medical leave of two years, he completed his undergraduate studies with the help of emerging AI accessibility tools, such as dictation software and ChatGPT. 

As a PhD student under the guidance of Professor Joonho Lee, Patryk is developing computational tools that will accelerate the discovery of materials for technologies like next-generation solar panels.