In this talk,
Dr. Aspuru-Guzik will describe
his group's efforts related to The Clean Energy Project (
http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu), a large-scale volunteer-donor distributed computing
project to find the best donor and acceptor materials for organic photovoltaics.
He will describe their progress towards the goal of an automated search for high-performance materials.
Dr. Aspuru-Guzik and his group have currently computed the electronic structure of 2.8 million candidate oligomer building blocks, and successfully carried out a related theory to experiment demonstration jointly with the group of Zhenan Bao at Stanford.
Dr. Aspuru-Guzik will describe the status and plans for the project, including the release of our top candidate list of compounds. Come prepared: Go to the Clean Energy Project website, download and install our client software in your computer to help
the environment with your free cycles of computer time.
Bio:
Alán Aspuru-Guzik is Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999
and his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. His research focuses on the interface of quantum information and chemistry. In particular, he is interested in the use of quantum computers and dedicated quantum simulators
for chemical systems. He and his group recently developed a density functional theory for open quantum systems. He leads the Clean Energy Project, a distributed computing effort for screening renewable energy materials. Since coming to Harvard in 2006, he
has received many honors, including the DARPA Young Faculty Award, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Everett-Mendelsson Graduate Mentoring Award, and the HP Outstanding Junior Faculty award from the Computers in Chemistry
division of the American Chemical Society. Last year he was selected as a Top Innovator Under 35 by MIT's Technology Review magazine.