ACS – John C. Crano Lecture by Prof John Herbert

Prof. John Herbert, The Ohio State University

“The Way (Chemical) Things Work: A Quantum Chemist’s Perspective”

The John C. Crano Lecture and Dinner will be given at The University of Mount Union, Newbold Room (Room 50) located in the Hoover-Price Campus Center.  The event includes appetizers with a student poster session, networking and dinner.

Schedule:
5 PM: Appetizers, networking, student poster sessions
6 PM: Dinner – vegetarian options available
7 PM: Lecture

Dinner tickets
$30 – Non-ACS Members
$25 – ACS Members
$10 – Students, unemployed, retirees
Free – virtual only attendees. Use the RSVP below; link to be sent prior to event.
Buy dinner tickets at the link below OR RSVP to StuthersRachel@bfusa.com and pay with a credit card at the door.

John Herbert Bio:  John Herbert grew up in Newton, KS and attended Kansas State University, initially as a chemical engineering major, before an encounter with the unnatural units of “pounds of mass” and “kilograms of force” sent him fleeing to the natural sciences. He ultimately graduated as a Mathematics and Chemistry dual major, having also been a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar. (He has nothing else in common with Barry Goldwater, so far he can tell.) For graduate school, he attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as a National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellow, where he worked with Prof. John Harriman on projects related to reduced density matrices for electronic structure theory, receiving a Ph.D. in 2003. He was briefly a postdoc with Prof. Anne McCoy at Ohio State University before moving to Prof. Martin Head-Gordon’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow. He has been a faculty member at The Ohio State University since 2006, holding the rank of Professor since 2014.

Professor Herbert is a past recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), along with fellowships from the Henry & Camille Dreyfus Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. From the American Chemical Society, he has been awarded the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry (2010), the Journal of Physical Chemistry A Lectureship (2013), and the Edward W. Morley Medal (2020). He was the Charles A. Coulson lecturer at the University of Georgia in 2022.

Professor Herbert’s research focuses on the development and application of novel methods and algorithms in electronic structure theory, with specific focus on computational spectroscopy in condensed-phase environments, solvation modeling, photochemistry, and the molecular physics of noncovalent interactions. He has been an active contributor to the Q-Chem software since 2004 and has served on its Board of Directors since 2012.

Evening talk abstract: “The Way (Chemical) Things Work: A Quantum Chemist’s Perspective”
This talk will provide an overview of what quantum chemistry is, targeted for an audience of chemists who don’t work on theory or computation. I will cover some aspects of my own work, such as bringing high-level quantum mechanics methods to bear on systems with hundreds or thousands of atoms (e.g., to address problems in noncovalent ligand binding to proteins, in the context of computer-aided drug discovery). However, much of this talk will focus on how fundamental chemical concepts such as reaction pathways emerge naturally from quantum chemistry calculations. I will describe quantum chemistry’s place in the scientific ecosystem and how it can be understood in simple, qualitative terms.

Note that there is also an afternoon talk at the University of Akron listed as a separate event on this website.