Martin Paul Head-Gordon (''né'' Martin Paul Head) is a professor of

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, and

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in the Berkeley Hills, hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established i ...

working in the area of computational

quantum chemistry Quantum chemistry, also called molecular quantum mechanics, is a branch of physical chemistry focused on the application of quantum mechanics to chemical systems, particularly towards the quantum-mechanical calculation of electronic contributions ...

. 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 and Master of Science degrees from

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

, followed by a PhD from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

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. Ear ...

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

integral In mathematics, an integral is the continuous analog of a Summation, sum, which is used to calculate area, areas, volume, volumes, and their generalizations. Integration, the process of computing an integral, is one of the two fundamental oper ...

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-Sham density functional framework. 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