Bo Chen is a postdoc at Cornell and has worked with Professor Roald Hoffmann since 2014. He received his Ph.D. at Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry in China in 2011, and did his first postdoc research at University of North Texas with Professor Weston Borden from 2012 to 2014. He is currently investigating the mechanism of benzene polymerization under pressure to form nanothreads, working together with the Badding and Crespi group at Penn State. He uses three approaches to address this problem: (a) an enumeration of partially saturated CH stacks that might arise from benzene; (b) the use of a helium compression chamber to emulate what happens to benzene under pressure; and (c) an examination in detail of the primary initiation and propagation steps in the pressure-initiated polymerization of benzene.