Mihai Popescu

Mihai V. Popescu is an organic chemist who left Colorado State University, where he served first as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2022–2024) and then as a Research Scientist (2024–2025) under Prof. Robert Paton, to join the University of Vienna's Institute of Organic Chemistry as an APART-USA fellow, a programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences created specifically for scientists leaving American institutions. He now serves as an Independent Research Group Leader at Vienna.

Popescu pursued his undergraduate MChem in Chemistry at the University of Manchester from 2013 to 2017, graduating at the top of his class and receiving the University of Manchester Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement. His masters research project was completed in Prof. David Procter's lab, working on SmI2 chemistry applied to natural product synthesis. He then joined the Synthesis for Biology and Medicine Centre for Doctoral Training (SBM-CDT) programme from 2017 to 2022, completing his doctoral thesis in Prof. Martin Smith's lab on photochemical reaction mechanisms.

At Colorado State University, Popescu worked in the areas of quantum chemical modelling and machine learning methods applied to organic chemistry. His research at Vienna continues this focus on computational and physical organic chemistry.