News

SDSC scientist Kim K. Baldridge will speak at a four-day international symposium titled "Making and breaking chemical bonds in gas and condensed phases: Theory and Applications," to be held at the 226th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in New York City from September 7 to 11. The symposium, organized by Professor Anna I. Krylov of the University of Southern California and Professor Mark S. Gordon of Iowa State University, will highlight recent developments in electronic structure methodology targeting the description of bond-breaking processes.

"We will be addressing bond-breaking in the broadest possible terms, ranging from small gas phase molecules that can be studied with the most accurate quantum chemical methods to materials and biomaterials that require innovative hybrid methods," Baldridge says. Her invited talk will focus on the range of scales from small molecules to proteins and the ways in which data and algorithms can be united using high-performance computing technologies.

The symposium, sponsored by IBM, the Petroleum Research Fund, and Q-Chem, will bring together 40 computational chemists from labs around the world. "Bond-breaking is central to chemistry, since the manner in which bonds are made and broken impacts chemical reactivity, reaction mechanisms, photochemistry in the gas phase, in solution, and on surfaces," says Gordon. "Given the very broad impact of chemistry on related fields, such as biology, materials science, and physics, the importance of this symposium, which brings together many of the leading developers of new methods for studying bond-breaking, extends well beyond the chemical sciences." - Merry Maisel