Ana Bahamonde is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at UC Riverside, where she runs a research group focused on light-mediated nickel catalysis. She grew up in northern Spain and started her chemistry training at the Universidad de Oviedo, finishing her B.Sc. in 2012. From there she moved to Catalonia for her PhD at ICIQ and the Universidad Rovira i Virgili, working with Paolo Melchiorre on photoredox reactions driven by organocatalysts. She wrapped that up in 2017 and headed to the University of Utah for a postdoc that ran through 2020, before starting her independent career at UCR. Her group sits at an interesting crossroads. They use nickel complexes under photochemical conditions to do two very different things, generate carbon-centered radicals that get trapped enantioselectively, and drive C to heteroatom reductive eliminations at room temperature. What makes the chemistry tricky and interesting is that both pathways run under nearly identical conditions, and the ligand features and photocatalyst properties that tip the system one way or the other are still poorly understood. Her group leans heavily on physical organic techniques and builds multivariate linear regression models that link enantioselectivity to computed molecular descriptors, so reaction optimization becomes a data problem rather than pure trial and error. The funding and recognition behind the work tells the same story of a fast-rising early-career PI. She holds an NSF CAREER Award (2023 to 2028) and an NIH MIRA (2024 to 2029), which is a strong dual-agency vote of confidence for a chemistry lab. She picked up the ACS Organic Division Young Investigator Award in 2025 and a Thieme Chemistry Journals Award earlier. Going further back, her thesis won the Chemistry Department award at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, and her PhD itself was funded by an FPU fellowship from Spain's Ministry of Education, which is roughly the Spanish counterpart to the NSF GRFP.