Three graduate students recently defended and have earned their PhDs. Congratulations to Patrick Lestrange, Joshua Goings, and David Lingerfelt. All three began their graduate careers in 2012 and have worked closely together for the last ~5 years. It’s sad to see them go, but we wish them all the best.

It’s been a big month for the Li group with three students defending and gaining their doctorate degrees. Phu Nguyen kicked off the defenses on May 19 by discussing his work on molecular dynamics and modeling X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy. He has accepted a job at Amazon and has already started working there. Bo Peng defended next on May 24 and discussed all of his work modeling excited states with wave function and DFT methods in both the time and frequency domain. Bo will be moving (not too far away) to accept a position as a researcher at Pacific Northwest National Lab. Last but not least was Erica Chong’s defense on June 10 where she spoke about her work studying quantum dot nanocrystals and their use for Li ion storage. Erica will be sticking around Seattle for at least the summer as a lecturer for General Chemistry. Congratulations to everyone!

Feizhi now has a newly minted Ph.D. He recently defended his dissertation titled “Towards efficient and accurate description of many-electron problems: developments of static and time-dependent electronic structure methods”. He will soon be moving to California to work with Tom Miller at Cal Tech. Congratulations, Feizhi!

Congratulations to the now Dr. Joseph May who defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Theoretical Insight into the Manipulation of the Optical and Magnetic Properties of TM2+-doped II-VI Semiconductor Quantum Dots” on Tuesday. Joseph will be moving to Las Vegas shortly to teach high school chemistry and will be sorely missed.

Today, the Li group says farewell to Dr. Wenkel Liang, who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “From Geometry Optimization to Time Dependent Molecular Structure Modeling: Method Developments, ab initio Theory and Applications” last month. Wenkel joined the research group in 2004 and has worked on numerous application and development projects resulting in 18 publications with Prof. Li, a group record! Wenkel will be missed, especially for his technical savvy, having been the group’s expert Gaussian coder and administrator for the chemistry department’s computer clusters. Wenkel will return home to Chengdu, China for a couple of months to visit friends and family. In July, he heads to Simulations Plus Inc. in Lancaster, California to begin work on applications using artificial neural networks ensembles (ANNE).