Tomislav I. Gountchev

NEW! Visit my new photo gallery or create a free forum at Nabble now!!!

Personal

I work as a Java Software Engineer. Before that I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, where I did a PhD in Chemistry. I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, graduated from the National High School for Natural Sciences and Mathematics, spent two years at Sofia University, and then went on to finish my undergraduate studies at Cambridge University, England, reading Natural Sciences. If you want to find out more about me, send me an e-mail.

My PhD thesis is also available for download in pdf format if you are really bored and have nothing better to read.

Photography

I spend some of my free time doing photography and travelling. My new photo gallery has pictures from my trips to many US National Parks, photos from the Bulgarian mountains - Rila, Pirin, Rodopi, my travel pictures from Europe, from my time in Cambridge, UK, and even some pictures of me...

Bulgaria

If you know Bulgarian, take a look at my collection of Bulgarian poetry here.

We have a Bulgarian Club here at Berkeley. Bulgarian events in the San Francisco Bay Area are announced on the UC Berkeley Bulgarian Club Mailing List. To join the mailing list, send an email to majordomo@listlink.berkeley.edu with the following message:

subscribe bulgarian_club

Not sure if it is worth joining the list? Just look at the picture gallery...

Nabble, a free forum website, also hosts other Bulgarian discussion forums and mailing lists archives.

Chemistry

If you want to learn more about the research I am was doing, here is a sequence of slides about one of my projects. For the real thing, see our publication in JACS:

Structure and Reactivity of Chelating Imido-Amido Complexes of Tantalum. Mechanistic Studies on the Addition of Silanes to Ta=N Multiple Bonds. (Tomislav I. Gountchev and T. Don Tilley, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1997, 119, 12831-12841.)

I doubt I will have the time to make slides about my yttrium chemistry, but my two papers about it have already been published:

Yttrium Complexes of the Chelating, C₂-Symmetric, Bis(silylamido)biphenyl Ligand [DADMB]^2- (={[6,6'-Me₂-(C₆H₃)₂](2,2'-NSiMe₂^tBu)₂}^2-). (Tomislav I. Gountchev and T. Don Tilley, Organometallics 1999, 18, 2896-2905.)

Hydrosilylation Catalysis by C₂-Symmetric Bis(silylamido) Complexes of Yttrium. (Tomislav I. Gountchev and T. Don Tilley, Organometallics 1999, 18, 5661-5667.)

If you don't have access to those journals online, read the corresponding chapters in my thesis - it is all there.

If you are a chemist using Linux and need a nice chemical calculator, try KMol - a Mw and elemental composition calculator that I recently wrote while learning how to use the Qt library.

last updated: May 15, 2005 Tomislav Gountchev

ICQ# 42186265   ...e-mail me at: tomi@gountchev.net My public GPG key.