On the occasion of Professor Raphael “Raphy” Levine’s 80th birthday, a symposium will be held in his honor at the ACS national meeting in Boston this August.
Levine will turn 80 on March 29, 2018. The symposium titled “Information Theory and Dynamics: From Elementary Processes to System Chemistry, In Honor of Raphy Levine’s 80th Birthday” will take place at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Physical Chemistry meeting during the ACS 256th National Meeting in Boston, MA, August 19-23, 2018. The deadline to submit an abstract for the symposium is March 12, 2018.
The symposium is being organized by Levine’s former Ph.D. student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor Sabre Kais, Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, and UCLA alumnus Professor Todd Martinez (Ph.D. Chemistry ’94, Carter group), David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor in Chemistry and Professor of Photon Science, Stanford University. Martinez was a UC Presidential postdoctoral fellow with Levine at UCLA from 1994-96.
The announcement for the symposium states: “the development and application of information theory in chemistry has progressed in several directions, from early work on developing an information theoretic approach to molecular dynamics, the so-called surprisal analysis, which describes the interacting molecular systems far from equilibrium to quantum chemistry of optimizing basis sets and describing correlations, to analytical chemistry for the search for a higher selectivity, and efficiency of analytical methods. Recently quantum information theory played a major role of developing techniques and quantum computers to solve important problems in chemistry—particularly focusing on energy transport in light harvesting complexes from the point of view of open quantum systems, entanglement and quantum process tomography. This symposium will highlight invited talks by theoretical chemists and system chemistry pioneers whose work builds on fundamental foundations to describe increasingly complex application of classical and quantum information theory in chemistry.”
A distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of medical and molecular pharmacology at UCLA, Levine joined the UCLA faculty in 1989. A theorist and biophysicist, he is known for his contributions in the modern theory of chemically reactive collisions and unimolecular reactions and has played a major role in the application of the principles of quantum mechanics to the description of physical change in a reaction from a microscopic point of view. The National Academy writes: “Levine has been a leader in establishing chemical reaction dynamics as an identifiable area in chemical physics. His “surprisal analysis” has become an IUPAC official term. His work in the role of energy in chemical reactions has been seminal.”
Levine received his graduate degrees at Nottingham University and Oxford University and he has honorary degrees from the Technische Universität München and from Liege University. He has been the Miller Research Professor at the University of California, Berkeley; the Andrew D. White Professor- at-Large at Cornell University; and the Max Born Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Hebrew University. Levine has received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for his theories of selectivity and specificity that underlie his surprisal analysis. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.
The symposium has no separate registration, but attendees do need to register for the ACS National Meeting to attend. For more information contact the symposium organizers, Prof. Kais at kais@purdue.edu and Prof. Martinez at toddjmartinez@gmail.com.
