The Pitzer Lecture in Theoretical Chemistry

The Pitzer Symposium Lecture will be held on Wednesday, November 7, 2012 in 2015 McPherson Laboratory.
Professor Martin Head-Gordon will present.
For more information on the lecture, please contact:
Therese O'Donnell-Leonard

Schedule of Events

• Wednesday, November 7, 2012 - 2015 McPherson Laboratory
• 4:10p.m. - Welcome, Professor and Chair, Susan Olesik
• 4:15p.m. - Lecture by Professor Martin Head-Gordon   2015MP
• "Calculating and analyzing intermolecular interactions using electronic structure theory"
• 5:00p.m. - Reception 2136NW

Russ Pitzer, Professor Emeritus

Russ Pitzer received his B.S. degree in chemistry with honor in 1959 from the California Institute of Technology where he also played football. In 1963 he received his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in the same year.

From 1963 to 1968 - Dr. Pitzer was a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology until he moved to the Ohio State University. He was promoted to professor in 1979. In 1986 Dr. Pitzer co-founded and served as Acting Associate Director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center. In 1988 he became a trustee of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, an institution which was founded by his father, Kenneth Pitzer, who was also a highly regarded chemist.

Dr. Pitzer served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at The Ohio State University from 1989 to1994. He was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters at Pitzer College in 2003.

1. He has held visiting faculty positions at Berkeley, Bielefeld (Germany), Cambridge (England) and the University of Georgia.
2. His doctoral thesis is considered one of the very few genuine landmarks in the history of theoretical chemistry.
3. The pioneering research Dr. Pitzer presented in his 1973 paper "Electron Repulsion Integrals and Symmetry Adapted Charge Distributions" enabled ab initio computations on larger molecular systems than previously possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Head-Gordon, PhD, 2012 Pitzer Speaker

Martin Head-Gordon completed B.Sc. (Hons) (1983) and M. Sc. (thesis) (1985) degrees at Monash University in Melbourne Australia, before coming to America to obtain his Ph. D. (1989) in theoretical chemistry at Carnegie-Mellon University, working with the late Sir John Pople on molecular orbital theory and algorithms. From 1989-1992 Head-Gordon was a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories, working with John Tully. He explored gas-surface energy exchange, and developed new models for non-adiabatic energy flow. Since 1992 Head-Gordon has been on the faculty of the Chemistry Department at the University of California Berkeley, with an additional appointment as a Senior Faculty Scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is known for development of linear scaling methods for performing density functional theory calculations, for new methods for calculating electronic excited states, and for advances in electron correlation methods. He is one of the driving forces behind the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program. Head-Gordon has received awards that include Packard (1995) and Sloan (1995) Fellowships, a Miller Research Professorship (2001-2), and the medal of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences (1998). He was elected to the IAQMS in 2006, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), and as an American Chemical Society Fellow (2012). He is an Associate Editor of Molecular Physics and serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, the Journal of Physical Chemistry and several other journals. He has served as Chair of the ACS Theoretical Chemistry Subdivision (2003), and was Program Chair and Chair of the ACS Division of Physical Chemistry (2009-2010). Head-Gordon has over 300 scientific publications, over 200 invited talks, and an h-index of 70.