Message from the Chair
Greetings fellow chemical physicists! I hope 2019 has been a fruitful year for all of you, with several more months for new discoveries. This issue includes information on
- The exciting program for our upcoming March 2020 meeting
- New APS Fellows
- The 2020 Plyler Prize winner
- Nominations for the 2020 Justin Jankunas Doctoral Dissertation Award
- Voting for members of the DCP Executive Committee.
Let’s start with the DCP program Albert Stolow has organized for the 2020 March meeting, which will be held in Denver, Colorado, March 2-6. Our focus sessions (and organizers) will be
- Electronic-Vibrational Coupling in Light Harvesting (Jacob Krich & David Jonas)
- Ultrafast Spectroscopies and Coherent Phenomena in the X-ray Domain (Shaul Mukamel and Michael Schuurman)
- Coherent Nonlinear Optical Microscopy (Adrian Pegoraro and Marcus Cicerone)
- Water Dynamics in Different Environments: Experiment and Theory (Mischa Bonn and Teresa Head-Gordon)
- Density Functional Theory and Beyond (Neepa Maita and Kieron Burke)
- The Chemical Physics of Molecular Polaritons (Joel Yuen Zhou and Wei Xiong)
Read the full descriptions of these Focus Sessions here. I encourage you to submit abstract to any of these sessions or under the standard sorting categories. Don’t miss the October 25, 2019 deadline for abstract submission.
We have funds are available to subsidize travel expenses of graduate students and post-docs and to provide child care for all people presenting a paper. The application deadline for these awards is October 26, 2019.
Please join me in congratulating five distinguished chemical physicists who have been elected Fellows of the APS through the Division of Chemical Physics. Our new Fellows are Carlos Silva (Georgia Institute of Technology), Hope Michelsen (University of Colorado, Boulder), Jack Syage (ImmunogenX), Mingfei Zhou (Fudan University), and Ying Jiang (Peking University). Eligibility for Fellowship is one of the benefits of DCP membership, and is bestowed each year to less than one half of one percent of the society’s membership.
I am pleased to announce that the 2020 Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics will be awarded to Anna Krylov (University of Southern California) for “her innovative work developing high accuracy electronic structure theory to inspire interpretation of spectroscopy of radicals, excited states, and ionization resonances in small molecules, biomolecules, and condensed phase solutes.”
I encourage you to nominate an outstanding recent Ph.D. recipient for the 2020 Justin Jankunas Doctoral Dissertation Award. The rapidly approaching nomination deadline is October 1, 2019. Eligible candidates should have passed their thesis defense during the twelve months prior to the nomination deadline. Both the nominee and the thesis advisor must be members of DCP. Three finalists will be chosen to give short talks at the DCP prize session, where the winner will be announced at the conclusion of the session.
Your donations to the Jankunas Award Endowment will solidify this award in perpetuity, and your support is needed to push us over the top. You may donate here, or contact David W. Chandler (Sandia National Laboratories) or me if you would like to discuss the award’s endowment.
Finally, election of members to the DCP Executive Committee will commence on September 23rd, and polls will close on October 21, 2019. This year Bret Jackson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Michael Heaven (Emory University) are candidates for Vice Chair. Richard Dawes (Missouri University of Science and Technology) and Wen Li (Wayne State University) are our candidates for Member-at-Large. Please contribute to the health of the division by exercising your right to vote.
I hope to see you all in Denver for a fantastic meeting!
Sincerely,
Laura Gagliardi
Chair
Division of Chemical Physics