Shameemah Thawoos, Ph.D.

Shameemah Thawoos, Ph.D., joined The University of Olivet as an assistant professor in chemistry in 2024. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Missouri, Columbia, specializing in experimental physical chemistry.

Dr. Thawoos’s research interest focuses on reaction kinetics and dynamics of reactions that occur under very low temperatures, specifically processes similar to those found in exoplanetary atmospheres. During her Ph.D. and postdoctoral training, she was actively involved in developing high sensitive spectroscopic techniques and instruments to study reactions under the temperature and environmental conditions present in Titan’s atmosphere. To achieve the reaction conditions at very low temperatures (as low as 20 K) she used the CRESU (A French acronym for Reaction kinetics in uniform supersonic flow) technique which utilizes a de-Laval nozzle creating a supersonic expansion. She has integrated the CRESU technique with several highly sensitive spectroscopic methods, including laser-induced fluorescence, cavity ring-down spectroscopy, chirped-pulse microwave spectroscopy, and resonance-enhanced multiphoton spectroscopy.

Currently, Dr. Thawoos teaches courses in physical chemistry, chemical instrumentation, general chemistry and introduction to chemical principles, along with their corresponding laboratory sections. During her tenure at UOlivet, she is working toward developing a research project that integrates pulsed uniform supersonic uniform flow created using a mini-Laval nozzle with sensitive photoacoustic spectroscopy to investigate reactions of astrochemical significance.

When not in the laboratory or classroom, Dr. Thawoos devotes her time to her two daughters, Aamina and Aayat.