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The group finally convinced Kurt to update the nearly two-year-old group photo, so it is also a good time to mention the considerable recent changes in the group over the last six months.

Two new graduate students, Mary Richardson and Colin Gopaul, have joined the group. Colin is joint advised with Prof. Matthias Young in Chemical Engineering.

Two new undergraduates, Matthew Cremer and Austin Richard, have also joined the group. Matthew used to do research with our group as a high-school student through our ongoing partnership with Helias Catholic and Dr. Collin Mayhan.

The group recently had the pleasure to attend the 2024 Spring ACS meeting in New Orleans. They experienced some significant flight delays that resulted in Gabbie and Dylan arriving at 3:00a to their hotel. The next day Gabbie powered through on about three hours of sleep to gave a talk on her recent work implementing constrained multicomponent MP2:

(As is probably clear from the better quality of this photo compared to the ACS MWRM photos, Kurt got a new phone for Christmas)

Dylan presented a poster on his recent work investigating the accuracy of vibrationally averaged dipole moments calculated with DFT-VPT2:

In combination with Prof. Yang Yang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Sharon Hammes-Schiffer of Princeton University, Kurt co-organized a symposium at the meeting on “Coupled-Quantum Systems.” He also ate gumbo every day while in New Orleans.

All-in-all, it was a successful conference. We were happy for the chance to catch up with old friends and meet many researchers whose work we had admired from a distance.

The group recently attended the 2023 ACS Midwest Regional Meeting. Gabbie and Dylan presented posters and Kurt gave a talk. While there were many talks that we enjoyed, we particularly enjoyed a talk discussing a paper with the provocative title “The phase stability network of all inorganic materials.“

Pictures of Gabbie and Dylan’s posters are below (Apologies that the photos appear taken with a potato. Blame Kurt’s awful phone.).

M has successfully defended his thesis and has graduated with his Ph.D.! Congratulations to Dr. Ardiansyah!

We are excited to announce that Dylan has been awarded a Goldwater Fellowship for 2023! The fellowship is a testament to Dylan’s hard work.

Much to the group’s joy, he has been grumbling about having to get interviewed by campus media and other similar things. Last Friday, for the first time ever, I saw Dylan wearing a collared shirt as the Chancellor had requested a picture for the Chancellor’s presentation to the Board of Curators. 🙂

Congratulations to Dylan!