Congratulations to Patrick for passing his second year exam! Patrick poked fun at the trials and tribulations encountered during his research project with a talk titled “The first pancake theory: Adventures in electronic structure”. The closed-door portion of the exam involved a research proposal on modeling transient X-ray absorption spectroscopy.

Congratulations to the now Dr. Joseph May who defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Theoretical Insight into the Manipulation of the Optical and Magnetic Properties of TM2+-doped II-VI Semiconductor Quantum Dots” on Tuesday. Joseph will be moving to Las Vegas shortly to teach high school chemistry and will be sorely missed.

Congratulations to Josh Goings, a second-year graduate student, who passed his departmental second-year exam today! Josh presented on his research titled “Equation of Motion Coupled Cluster for Excited States”. The exam involved a public presentation of Josh’s ongoing graduate research followed by a closed-door presentation of his research proposal with his exam committee.

Congratulations to Feizhi Ding who passed his general exam. Feizhi presented on his work developing efficient methods for solving the real-time time-dependent Hartree-Fock and density functional theory equations. He also discussed his application of these methods to the study of organic photovoltaics in collaboration with Professor Alex Jen’s and Professor David Ginger’s labs at the University of Washington and on surface plasmon resonances in silver nanoparticle chains in collaboration with Assistant Professor Christine Aikens at Kansas State University. Feizhi has earned his Ph.D. candidacy and will be working to bring real-time time-dependence to mutlireference methods.

Congratulations to the newly-minted Dr. Sean Fischer who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Hopping Around: Development of Methods for the Simulation of Non-Adiabatic Dynamics in Large Molecular Systems”. Sean will continue his work for the next quarter as a postdoctoral researcher in the group.

Congratulations to Bo Peng and Jeremy Lehner for passing the departmental second-year exam. Bo presented his work on anisotropic exchange splittings in transition-metal-doped II-VI semiconducting nanocrystals. Jeremy presented his work on geometry optimization, discussing a modification to the rational function optimization for transition state optimizations.

Congratulations to Joseph May for passing his third-year general examination. Joseph presented his work “Manipulating the Optical and Magnetic Properties of Zinc Oxide Quantum Dots”. Joseph is now a doctoral candidate and is free from worrying about exams until he defends his dissertation in a couple of years.

Today, the Li group says farewell to 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” last month. Wenkel joined the research group in 2004 and has worked on numerous application and development projects resulting in 18 publications with Prof. Li, a group record! Wenkel will be missed, especially for his technical savvy, having been the group’s expert Gaussian coder and administrator for the chemistry department’s computer clusters. Wenkel will return home to Chengdu, China for a couple of months to visit friends and family. In July, he heads to Simulations Plus Inc. in Lancaster, California to begin work on applications using artificial neural networks ensembles (ANNE).

Congratulations to Erica Chong, Feizhi Ding, and Phu Nguyen for passing the departmental second-year exam.

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.