Event

Solving Hard Chemistry Problems by Throwing Dice

There has been steady progress in the development of quantum chemistry methods over the last 100 years, but the ability to reliably treat large systems and systems with strongly interacting electrons, such as bond breaking problems and transition metal-containing complexes, still remains a frontier challenge.  In this talk I will describe a method based on the stochastic (Monte Carlo) treatment of the relevant quantum mechanical equations, and illustrate its power and potential with several examples from chemistry and materials science.

Bio

David Reichman is currently the Centennial Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. He received his B.A. in Physics at the University of Chicago in 1992 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry at MIT in 1997 where he was an AFOSR Fellow working under the direction of Robert Silbey. From 1997 to 1999, he was a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Utah working under the direction of Greg Voth.

Reichman started his independent career in 1999 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard. In 2003, he was promoted to the rank of John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and then the rank of Professor with tenure in 2004, before moving to Columbia University in the same year. In 2005, he shared the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences with Christopher Jarzynski and Christoph Dellago "for their ground breaking developments in statistical mechanics and seminal contributions to the dynamics of disordered condensed matter."  Reichman has also received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the NSF CAREER award, the 2017 ACS Division of Physical Chemistry Award in Theoretical Chemistry, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. He served as Chemistry Department Chair from 2017 to 2020 and has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics since 2017.