Reports: SE
48238-SE Advances in the Electronic Structure of Transition Metal Systems and Organometallics, at the ACS National Meeting, August 17-21, 2008, Philadelphia, PA
This award supported a Symposium held at the National ACS Meeting in Philadelphia from Aug/17-21/2008 entitled “Advances in the Electronic Structure of Transition Metal Systems and Organometallics”. There were a total of 8 half-day sessions with 32 invited speakers, of which two had to cancel last minute due to family emergencies, and there were 14 contributed presentations. The support from PRF for this symposium was only used to cover travelling costs of the 5 international speakers, the Professors Neese, Bickelhaupt, Frenking, Pierloot and Thiel.
The symposium was a great success both attendance wise and from the depth and intensity of scientific exchange. Given the recently increased urgency and interest in catalysis related to alternative energy, special attention was paid both at the planning stage and during execution to this area. By inviting both theoreticians and experimentalists we hoped to encourage complementary and fruitful discussions and we were not disappointed. For example, Ken Houk, Dean Tantillo, Matthias Bickelhaupt and Mike Hall delivered very interesting talks on reaction mechanisms and electronic structures of catalysts and catalyst candidates that inspired much discussion in full participation of experimentalists in the audience, including Justine Roth, John Montgomery and Robert Szilagyi. Another series of talks that sparked much interest included lectures by Frank Neese who discussed new ways of accessing high-level correlated ab initio methods to complement density functional methods, Kristine Pierloot lectured on multiconfigurational theory beyond a standard CASSCF approach for large transition metal complexes and Bill Goddard, III gave an exciting talk on his new approach to modeling high temperature systems of mesoscale models.
