About me

Hi. I’m on a mission to build a research institute in Sfantu Gheorghe, Romania, which aims to carry out cutting-edge research in computational nanotechnology and nanomedicine. I am also CEO of Promedical Center, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. I did my PhD in computational chemistry in the Wales group at the University of Cambridge, and was a young research fellow in the group of Bela Viskolcz at the University of Szeged, Hungary. On this page you can find out more about me and my research.

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My main area of research is studying the energy landscapes of model nanoscale systems that can be termed self-assembling. Unfortunately, the term ‘self-assembly’ is a very fashionable word that is highly overused. In order to avoid any confusion, we define systems as ‘self-assembling’, if they have well-defined global minima, and other stable structures (minima) on their potential energy landscapes can find their way to the global minimum climbing only low barriers.

The importance of understanding self-assembly in general is far-reaching, having implications in nanotechnology, medicine, pharmaceutics etc. Using theoretical approaches can give important insights into the overall process of assembly, and explain why certain systems form particular structures easily over a wide range of temperatures, while others don’t.

During my PhD, I studied the effects of shape and interaction anisotropies of the building blocks on the self-assembling characteristics of their clusters. By using and developing new model potentials, I created building blocks that self-assemble into helices, icosahedral and non-icosahedral shells, tubes, spirals, and other exotic morphologies. My current ‘hot topic’ is virus capsid assembly and elucidating the minimal physical conditions that allow the assembly of hollow shells from nanoscale building blocks.

Journal covers

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Selected publications

Z. Antal, J. Szoverfi and S. N. Fejer, J. Chem. Inf. Model, 57(4), 910-917 (2017). Predicting the Initial Steps of Salt Stable Cowpea Chlorotic Mottle Virus Capsid Assembly with Atomistic Force Fields

S. N. Fejer and D. J. Wales, Soft Matter 11(33), 6663-6668 (2015). Design of a Kagome lattice from soft anisotropic particles

S. N. Fejer, D. Chakrabarti, H. Kusumaatmaja and D. J. Wales, Nanoscale 6(16), 9448-9456 (2014). Design principles for Bernal spirals and helices with tunable pitch

S. N. Fejer, D. Chakrabarti and D. J. Wales, ACS Nano, 4, 219-228 (2010). Emergent complexity from simple anisotropic building blocks: Shells, tubes and spirals

Contact me

… or by email: szilard.fejer (at) cantab.net