Martin Philip Head-Gordon (''né'' Martin Philip Head) is a professor of chemistry at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working in the area of computational quantum chemistry. He is a member of the

International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science The International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS) is an international scientific learned society covering all applications of quantum theory to chemistry and chemical physics. It was created in Menton in 1967. The founding members we ...

Education

A native of Australia, Head-Gordon received his

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

and

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast t ...

degrees from

Monash University Monash University () is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named for prominent World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university h ...

, followed by a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University working under the supervision of

John Pople Sir John Anthony Pople (31 October 1925 – 15 March 2004) was a British theoretical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry. Early ...

developing a number of useful techniques including the Head-Gordon-Pople scheme for the evaluation of

integral In mathematics, an integral assigns numbers to functions in a way that describes displacement, area, volume, and other concepts that arise by combining infinitesimal data. The process of finding integrals is called integration. Along wit ...

s, and the orbital rotation picture of orbital optimization.

Career and research

At Berkeley, Martin supervises a group interested in pairing methods, local correlation methods, dual-basis methods, scaled MP2 methods, new efficient algorithms, and very recently corrections to the

Kohn Kohn is both a first name and a surname. Kohn means cook in Yiddish. It may also be related to Cohen. Notable people with the surname include: * Angela Kohn ( Jacki-O), rapper * Arnold Kohn, Croatian Zionist and longtime president of the Jewish c ...

-Sham density functional framework. Broadly speaking, wavefunction based methods are the focus of his research. Head-Gordon is one of the founders of

Q-Chem Q-Chem is a general-purpose electronic structure package featuring a variety of established and new methods implemented using innovative algorithms that enable fast calculations of large systems on various computer architectures, from laptops and ...

Inc.

Awards and honors

In 2015, Head-Gordon was elected a

Member of the National Academy of Sciences Membership of the National Academy of Sciences is an award granted to scientists that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States judges to have made “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research”. Membership ...

References

Living people Members of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science Australian emigrants to the United States Carnegie Mellon University alumni UC Berkeley College of Chemistry faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1962 births Computational chemists Theoretical chemists Schrödinger Medal recipients {{chemist-stub