• June 23, 2012: Dr. Kwangho Nam (Gao's group), Chemistry Ph.D. (2006), has taken a Forskarassistent position (tenure track Assistant Professor) at Umeå University, Sweden. During his Ph.D. research, Kwangho implemented the QM/MM module (SQUANTUM) that is currently distributed in CHARMM. Among other unique projects, he developed methods for QM/MM dynamics simulations of vibrational energy relaxation and spectral shifts in enzymes, reactive flux simulation of enzymatic transmission, linear-scaling QM/MM-PME technique, the AM1/d Hamiltonian for phosphoryl transfer reactions, and ribozyme catalysis. He has been a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Martin Karplus before taking this new position.


• June 23, 2012: Dr. Kin-Yiu Wong (Gao's group), Chemical Physics Ph.D. (2009), will be returning to his alma mater, Hong Kong Baptist University, this fall to take a tenure track Assistant Professor position in the Physics Department, which has a strong emphasis in biophysics. While in Minnesota, Dr. Wong was instrumental in the development and implementation of a second-order Kleinert variational perturbation (KP2) theory for the centroid density of path integral simulations of kinetic isotope effects for chemical reactions. In addition, he has carried out some of the most detailed analyses of phosphoryl transfer reactions catalyzed by phosphotriesterases and phosphodiesterases. In the past three years, Dr. Wong has been a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Darrin York.


• June 12, 2012: Newly minted Dr. Mehmed Zahid Ertem (Cramer group) successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Oxidation of Water to Molecular Oxygen by Transition-Metal Compounds: Quantum Chemical Characterization." Zahid and his family are headed next to New England where he will pursue postdoctoral work with Prof. Victor Batista and Dr. Jim Muckerman as part of a collaboration between Yale Chemistry and Brookhaven National Laboratory.


• June 1, 2012: Former postdoctoral associate Ben Gherman (Cramer group) was promoted to Associate Professor of Chemistry with tenure at California State University, Sacramento.


• April 13, 2012: Dr. Shikha Nangia, Chemistry Ph. D. 2006 (Truhlar group), has accepted a tenure-track faculty position in the Biomedical and Chemical Engineering Department at Syracuse University.
  

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