Leslaw K. Bieniasz's
scientific interests

My scientific interests concentrate around the widely understood subject of computer-aided modelling of electrochemical kinetic phenomena. I believe that natural sciences will gradually become dominated by computer-aided methodologies, and to large extent automated. Ultimately (albeit possibly in a distant future) this will also apply to intellectual activities, so far reserved only for humans.

Traditional division of natural sciences into disciplines is becoming obsolete, and new emerging interdisciplinary fields: computational physics, computational chemistry, computational biology, etc. (and computational science in general) belong to the most active areas of research. A further penetration of computer science into natural sciences can be expected, in accordance with the prophetic prediction by Allen Newell, the late AI expert from the Carnegie Mellon University (USA).

My intention is to contribute to this trend, because automation of our ways of doing science is likely to bring an enormous increase of the productivity of the scientific research. Achievement of this goal will also undoubtedly become the greatest success of the human mind, much greater than any contemporary investigations oriented towards solution of narrow problems in various branches of natural sciences.

Electrochemistry (and electrochemical kinetics in particular) is an attractive field for anybody willing to contribute to the above trends in contemporary science. First, difficult computational problems present in electrochemistry remain almost unknown to the wider community of natural and computational scientists. They seem to be notoriously neglected in the literature devoted to computational chemistry. They are even not present in the general literature on the chemical kinetic modelling. This has to be changed, and computational electrochemistry should emerge as a well established and recognised field. Second, the current "state of the art" of computer-aided methodologies in electrochemistry is relatively less developed, compared with other branches of natural sciences. Transfer of advanced ideas from modern computer and computational sciences, and their various application areas, is highly desirable. There is a lot to be done here. Third, electrochemical kinetics is like "Big Science" in miniature. One proposes little theories, or models, and verifies them based on experimental data. Owing to the limited (compared with "Big Sciences" such as Physics) set of alternative assumptions, usually accepted in these models, it seems relatively easy to investigate, step by step, how we create the models, how we develop them, and apply them to our data. It is therefore likely that it will be relatively simple to make this process largely automatic, although many problems have still to be solved before we can say it is done.

Not everything is easy, of course. Based on my experience, I have an impression that the computational approach to electrochemistry is not very popular among electrochemists, and does not find wide appreciation. For example, despite the utmost relevance and importance of computer methodologies for almost every kind of electrochemical research, the International Society of Electrochemistry, the world-wide organisation of electrochemists, still does not have a division devoted to the computer-aided or computational electrochemistry (note that, for example, the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society have divisions devoted to computational physics and chemistry, respectively). But let's not get discouraged: there is also no division of ISE devoted specifically to electrochemical instrumentation, although the electrochemist Jaroslav Heyrovsky received the Nobel prize in Chemistry for "his discovery and development of the polarographic methods of analysis", which is undoubtedly a subject related to the electrochemical instrumentation, or methodology.

The above ideas find expression in my attempts to construct a universal Problem Solving Environment for the modelling of electrochemical transients. This program, named ELSIM, is available to interested electrochemists, and has already quite large capabilities, probably much larger than any other of the similar programs currently available. More work in this direction is planned and desired. However, writing this program is not necessarily a primary goal of my research. It's rather a by-product of my efforts to develop new, advanced and automatic methodologies for the computer modelling of electrochemical kinetic phenomena. It is also a "private laboratory", where I can test various ideas and improve my own understanding of electrochemical kinetics.

Apart from the above I am also interested in more traditional theory of electroanalytical transient methods, and some specific areas of traditional electrochemistry, in particular the kinetics of electrocatalytic reactions in molten salts.