47436-SE
Computational Spectroscopy, at the ACS National Meeting, April 2008, New Orleans, LA
The symposium on “Computational Spectroscopy”, supported by the grant, PRF 47436-SE, was held at the ACS National meeting in New Orleans during April 6-10, 2008. It was a very highly successful symposium, and was part of the programming for the Physical Chemistry division of the ACS. There were nine half-day sessions at the symposium. There were a total of 36 invited lectures (40 minutes each), and 27 additional contributed talks (20 minutes each) were selected from the contributed abstracts. There were additional posters (about 40) during the poster session held on Wednesday evening. Most of the contributed oral presentations were given by young Faculty members or post-doctoral research associates, giving them an opportunity in front of a National audience. Most of the posters were given by graduate students, and Jeff Gour, a graduate student from Michigan State, won one of the divisional awards for the top poster.
The specific sub-topics in the symposium (names of the invited speakers in parenthesis) were “Electronic Spectroscopy (Morokuma, Head-Gordon, Lisy, Gordon)”, “Vibrational Spectroscopy (Duncan, Schleyer, Jordan, Frisch)”, “Spectroscopy and Dynamics (Robb, Iyengar, Zwier, McKoy)”, “Spectroscopy of Materials (Doren, Chabal, Ziegler, Corcelli, Bent, Musgrave, Yaron, Brown)“, “Photoelectron Spectroscopy (Ortiz, Jarrold, Wang, Boldyrev)”, and “NMR and rotational spectroscopy (Pulay, Mandelshtam, Lee, Buehl)”. The symposium had another major highlight. There were two special sessions held in honor of Prof. Rod Bartlett (Schaefer, Gauss, Stanton, Crawford, Nooijen, Scuseria, Michl, Harrison), a pioneer in the field of computational spectroscopy.
There were three foreign speakers who were supported by the PRF funding ($1,200 each). They were Prof. Mike Robb (Imperial College, London), Prof. Jurgen Gauss (University of Mainz, Germany), and Prof. Michael Buehl (originally at Max Planck Institute, Germany, presently relocated to University of St. Andrews, Scotland). They all delivered excellent lectures.
Most of the invited speakers were experts in their areas, and the lectures were all well attended. The attendance figures were 85-90 (Sunday), 70-75 (Monday), 60-65 (Tuesday), 40-45 (Wednesday), and 20-25 (Thursday). The attendance drop off during the final two sessions of the conference was typical for a 5 day ACS meeting. This was one of the well-attended physical chemistry symposia during this ACS meeting. There were also good participation from the audience, and many lively discussions after all the lectures.
