Welcome, Cooper

Welcome to Cooper Forster who joined us for six weeks as a third-year research student.

Dr Lars Goerigk promoted to Associate Professor

Dr Lars Goerigk has been promoted to Associate Professor, effective from 1 January 2023.

Poster award for Zahra Zahir

Congratulations to Zahra (co-supervised with Prof. Colette Boskovic) for winning the best poster prize at the 2nd Asian Conference on Molecular Magnetism in Bhopal, India.

Zahra wins award for best talk

Congratulations to Zahra (co-supervised with Prof. Colette Boskovic) for winning the prize for the best talk at the RACI VIC Inorganic Chemistry postgraduate symposium.

Successful ARC Discovery Project bid

Dr Lars Goerigk is Co-Chief Investigator with Drs Sebastian Furness (University of Queensland, lead investigator) and Chris Ritchie (Monash University) on a successful 2023 Discovery Project funded for four years by the Australian Research Council. International partner investigators are Prof. Robert Prosser (University of Toronto) and Asst. Prof. Stpehane Aloise (University of Lille). Read the summary of this highly interdisciplinary project below:

Proteins perform almost every task that enables the amazing complexity of cellular and whole organism physiology. These molecular machines perform this incredible array of tasks due to their ability to dynamically change shape. For the vast majority of these machines, we can only view a snapshot of the possible shapes they can adopt and can’t monitor how they change from one shape to another, which is critical for their functioning. This project aims to develop and apply a completely new method to visualise dynamic changes in protein shape which is not possible with current techniques. This will allow us to provide a new description and understanding of the function of proteins, which is fundamental to all biology.

Lars Goerigk awarded with Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research

Dr Lars Goerigk has been awarded the 2022 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research (Mid-Career) by the Faculty of Science, The University of Melbourne, for his developments in the area of time-dependent Density Functional Theory.

Hat-trick for our students at the Melbourne Meeting for Molecular Modellers

Last Friday, the M^4 Meeting (Melbourne Meeting for Molecular Modellers) was held for the first time since 2014. The meeting attracted about 70 participants from universities and research institutes around Melbourne and Geelong and was a great success for some of our students who took home three of the four student prizes. Congratulations to:

• Dominique Wappett for the best poster prize for her poster “Benchmarking Density Functional Theory for reactions catalysed by metalloenzymes”
• Amy Hancock for the third-best poster prize for her poster “Do modern TD-DFT methods rise to the challenge of noncovalent excited-state binding?”
• Zahra Zahir (co-supervised with Prof. Colette Boskovic) for the best oral presentation by an HDR student for her talk “Robust DFT-based strategies for predicting valence tautomeric complexes”

Well done, everyone!

New paper in Chemical Science

We have contributed to a new Edge Article in Chemical Science on a new photo-switchable molecular capsule. The work has been led by Dr Chris Ritchie from Monash University and involves several national and international collaborators with us providing QM insights. The article can be found here.

Amy wins award for best demonstrator in second year

Congratulations to Amy who won the School of Chemistry award for best second-year demonstrator.

Highly cited article in The Journal of Chemical Physics