Chemistry graduate student wins prestigious early career award
One of the greatest challenges in quantum chemistry is the development of practical yet robust and systematically improvable treatments of many-electron correlation effects, which are needed to accurately determine ground- and excited-state molecular potential energy surfaces and property functions that emerge in studies of chemical reactivity, spectroscopy and photochemistry.
Stephen H. Yuwono, a Michigan State University graduate student in the Department of Chemistry, College of Natural Science, won the prestigious Longuet-Higgins Early Career Researcher Prize awarded by the editors of Molecular Physics for his article “Accelerating convergence of equation-of-motion coupled-cluster computations using the semi-stochastic CC(P;Q) formalism,” which was named the journal’s best paper in 2020.
The Longuet-Higgins Early Career Researcher Prize, which includes a $1,000 stipend, is given annually to a researcher who has written and published a top-quality article in Molecular Physics the previous year and within five years of being awarded their Ph.D. Authors who have not yet completed their Ph.D. can be awarded the prize as well.
Yuwono’s paper, co-authored by colleagues Arnab Chakraborty, J. Emiliano Deustua, Jun Shen and Piotr Piecuch, professor of chemistry, addresses the issue of developing practical computational methods based on the equation-of-motion coupled-cluster (EOMCC) theory capable of accurately describing excited electronic states that emerge in studies of photochemistry and photoinduced reactivity. The key idea of this work is the identification of the leading wave function components of the parent EOMCC approach with the help of stochastic configuration interaction Quantum Monte Carlo sampling, followed by the determination of CC(P;Q) corrections to capture the remaining many-electron correlation effects.
“I received the notification about winning the Longuet-Higgins Early Career Prize on my way to work,” Yuwono said. “Thrilled, I shared the news with my co-authors—without whom the work would not have been done—as soon as I arrived at my office. I am honored to have been selected for this award and am most grateful to the editors of Molecular Physics. This recognition encourages me to continue pursuing theoretical and computational chemistry and to work even harder on challenging and interesting problems of modern electronic structure theory.”
“From a large number of nominations for the 2020 Longuet-Higgins Early Career Researcher Prize, the panel of editors chose [Yuwono’s] as the best paper published in Molecular Physics in 2020,” said Nigel Balmforth, portfolio manager, physical sciences, Taylor & Francis Group [publisher of Molecular Physics].
Yuwono is a senior doctoral student in Piecuch’s lab, a theoretical and computational chemistry group, with additional interests in theoretical and computational physics. Yuwono’s winner’s profile can be found in the 2021 Molecular Physics article e2003963. The official announcement of his receipt of the prize was published in the 2021 Molecular Physics article e2010864.
Piecuch’s lab is primarily interested in the development and molecular applications of many-body methods of quantum mechanics, particularly coupled-cluster approaches, but has also developed analogous methods for the nuclear structure theory. The group’s focus is on theories based on first principles of quantum mechanics that allow researchers to be predictive and that are systematically improvable.
“I am thrilled that Stephen has been awarded the Longuet-Higgins Early Career Researcher Prize and would like to congratulate him on this outstanding recognition,” said Piecuch, Yuwono’s mentor. “Stephen’s research performance in our group has been phenomenal. His collaboration with Arnab, Jun, and, until his graduation in May 2020, Emiliano on our Molecular Physics publication, which was named the journal’s best paper in 2020, was truly exemplary. We would like to thank the editors of Molecular Physics for recognizing our paper in such a wonderful manner.”
Banner image: Stephen Yuwono is a senior doctoral student in Piotr Piecuch’s lab, a theoretical and computational chemistry group in the MSU Department of Chemistry, with additional interests in theoretical and computational physics.
