Congratulations to former graduate student Christine Isborn who will start as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Merced. Christine graduated with her Ph.D. from the group in May of 2009. Most recently, Christine has been a postdoctoral researcher for Todd Martinez at Stanford University. Christine is Xiaosong’s first student to graduate with a Ph.D. and the whole group congratulates her and wishes her luck with this new endeavor.

For more information on Christine and to learn more about her up-and-coming research group, visit her website.

Congratulations to the newly-minted Dr. Wenkel Liang who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “From Geometry Optimization to Time Dependent Molecular Structure Modeling: Method Developments, ab initio Theory and Applications”. Wenkel will continue with his work in the group for the remainder while he considers job prospects in industry.

Bo Peng’s paper, “Theoretical Evaluation of Spin-Dependent Auger De-Excitation in Mn2+-Doped Semiconductor Nanocrystals,” which describes Auger de-excitation process in Mn2+-doped CdS quantum dots, was just accepted into the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. The “Just Accepted Manuscript” is available here.