Professor Angela K. Wilson

Professor Angela K. Wilson
Department of Chemistry
Michigan State University

Unraveling the Periodic Table, Spanning the Control of Excitation Pathways to Environmental Contaminants

Theoretical chemistry provides vital developments to unravel some of our most challenging chemical problems. An ongoing challenge is throughput – how to describe chemical properties well, not just aiming for qualitative accuracy, but quantitative accuracy – but, to do so efficiently. In this talk, a range of computational methodologies, including some we have developed, will be discussed and demonstrated, in terms of their utility towards achieving quantitative or qualitative accuracies in the prediction of thermochemical properties. Our work has spanned the periodic table, and demonstrations throughout the periodic table will be provided. In recent work, we have developed methodologies that enables control of excitation and de- excitation pathways for transition metal species, and in this work, our model systems are relevant to processes targeting replacement of species like ruthenium in solar cells with more earth-abundant species. As well, our group has been well-engaged in per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) research, with a focus upon the modeling of PFAS interactions in a range of environments, with some demonstrations of the impact of methodology choice.

Angela K. Wilson

Angela Wilson is the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor, Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the MSU College of Natural Sciences, and Director of the MSU Center for Quantum Computing, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. She was the 2022 President of the American Chemical Society (ACS), and is presently Board of Directors and Treasurer of the American Physical Society. She has served as Division Director (head) of the NSF Division of Chemistry. She is a Fellow of the ACS, APS, and AAAS, and her awards include: the Francis P. Garvan-John M. Olin Medal, AWIS Zenith Award, Iota Sign Pi National Honorary Award, and IUPAC Distinguished Woman in Chemistry Award. She was named one of the top 45 most influential women chemists and top 40 most influential women in STEM in the world during 2010-2020. She is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Cell Reports Physical Science and is the editor of Annual Reports in Computational Chemistry. She obtained her Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Minnesota.

Hosted by Professor Donald Truhlar