The Dreyfus Foundation is proud to sponsor a symposium on Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, the topic of the 2017 Dreyfus Prize, at the spring national meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans on Tuesday, March 20, 2018. The distinguished speakers include Michele Parrinello, the winner of the 2017 Dreyfus Prize. The symposium, which will be held in Room 206 of the Convention Center, is sponsored by the American Chemical Society Multidisciplinary Program Planning Group and co-sponsored by the Physical Chemistry and Computers in Chemistry divisions.

9:00 am: Introduction, Jerald Schnoor, University of Iowa

Session 1. Chair: Daniel Nocera, Harvard University

9:15 am: Emily Carter, Princeton University, Insights from Ab Initio Potential Energy Surfaces and Molecular Dynamics for Sustainable Energy Technologies


9:50 am: Glenn Fredrickson, University of California, Santa Barbara, Field-Theoretic Simulations: From Advanced Materials to Quantum Liquids

Session 2. Chair: Richard Zare, Stanford University

10:40 am: Kendall Houk, University of California, Los Angeles, Dynamics and Mechanisms of Pericyclic Reactions


11:15 am: Mark Ratner, Northwestern University, Metals, Molecules, Mixing, and Mastery

Session 3. Chair: Louis Brus, Columbia University

2:00 pm: Wolfgang Domcke, Technical University of Munich, How to Burn Water with Sunlight? Insights from Computational Chemistry

2:35 pm: Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, Yale University, Proton-coupled Electron Transfer in Catalysis and Energy Conversion

Session 4. Chair: Matthew Tirrell, The University of Chicago

3:25 pm: Roberto Car, Princeton University, Variational Sampling and Renormalization Theory

4:00 pm: Michele Parrinello, Università della Svizzera italiana & ETH Zurich, Fluctuations, Entropy, and Rare Events