Tuesday, February 10 | 11 – noon
Classroom Building 170

An Overview and Update on Quantum Chemistry Projects in the Dutoi Group

My research has three distinct veins at the moment, and I will give a short overview of each. I will begin with my longest line of research, which can be characterized as an ambitious quest to develop an electronic structure method that makes wave function-based rigor routinely available to systems beyond of thousands of atoms. The next project consists of a relatively small amount of analytical work that has had an outsized impact on quantitative fitting of X-ray photoelectron spectra, but which leaves more theoretical questions opened than experimental questions answered (this is not a bad thing). Finally, I will give an overview of research that is largely in the hands of Luka Dockx, which I co-supervise with Balint Sztaray. This work has contributed to both quantitative simulation of and qualitative understanding of photofragmentation processes.

About the Speaker

Tony Dutoi grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, and studied chemistry at Saint Louis University. A Fulbright Scholarship allowed him to study for one year in Göttingen, Germany, and then he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Martin Head-Gordon at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation research was on novel approaches to solving the electronic Schrödinger equation for molecules. He took a postdoc with Tamar Seideman at Northwestern University, looking at the electron dynamics underlying high-order harmonic generation and then moved to Heidelberg, Germany, with a Humboldt Fellowship, in order to research correlated electron dynamics with Lorenz Cederbaum. Since 2012, he has been a professor at University of the Pacific. He recently returned from a sabbatical research stay in Heidelberg, Germany, sponsored by Humboldt alumni funding.