Professor Benjamin Schwartz gave the prestigious Musher Memorial Lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on June 5.
Schwartz’s lecture was titled “The Hydrated Electron Dilemma: To be or not to be in a Cavity?”. His host was Professor Shlomo Magdassi of the Casali Center for Applied Chemistry, the Institute of Chemistry and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. While in Israel, Schwartz gave general physical chemistry seminars at both Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University.
The Jeremy Musher Visiting Lectureship was established in 1974 by inventor, pharmaceuticals executive, and philanthropist Sidney Musher in the memory of his son. The lectureship draws from all areas of chemistry and several previous recipients of the lectureship went on to become Nobel Laureates.
A physical chemistry professor and member of UCLA’s California Nano Systems Institute, Schwartz’s research group is one of the few pursing both experimental and theoretical approaches to solving chemical reaction dynamics problems. The experimental techniques focus largely on femtosecond spectroscopies, and particularly 3-pulse pump-probe experiments that allow for direct examination of transient species such as the excited states of conjugated polymers or reactive solvated atoms and electrons. The theoretical techniques include both the development and application of new algorithms for dealing with the breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in mixed quantum/classical simulations and the development of new methods for deriving the pseudopotentials used in such simulations.
To learn more about Prof. Schwartz’s research visit his group’s website.
