Donald G. Truhlar

Donald G. Truhlar was born in and went to school in Chicago, Illinois. He obtained a B. A. from St. Mary’s College in Winona, Minnesota and a Ph. D. from Caltech in Pasadena, California. Since 1969, he has been on the faculty of the Chemistry Department of the University of Minnesota, where he is now Regents Professor.

His research is in theoretical and computational physical chemistry with special emphases on reaction dynamics and quantum mechanics. He has studied the quantum mechanical, semiclassical, and classical treatment of chemical reactions and energy transfer processes and new methods for molecular modeling. He has spent considerable effort developing variational transition state theory and multidimensional tunneling methods for calculating reaction rates, algebraic variational methods for accurate quantum mechanical calculations of rearrangement scattering, and semiclassical methods for including coherence and decoherence in photochemical dynamics. He has also studied electronic structure methods-both wave function theory and density functional theory-for calculating the potential energy surfaces and couplings needed for Born-Oppenheimer and electronically nonadiabatic processes.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and he has received awards for physical chemistry, computers in chemistry, and dynamics from the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society,and Royal Society of Chemistry.