Northwestern Chemistry welcomes Kendall Houk from UCLA, hosted by the Undergraduate Chemistry Council.
Computational Chemistry Solves Problems and Illuminates
My talk will describe the development of computational chemistry and how I became a computational organic chemist. I will describe how computations can solve problems discovered by experimentalists and can also provide insights about how things work. To illustrate, I will describe several classic problems from last century, the mechanism of the Diels-Alder reactions and the structure of the norbornyl cation, and how complete understanding was obtained this century by advanced instruments and computations made possible by powerful computers. Computations have also revealed unforeseen things in this century: the ubiquity of ambimodal transition states in higher-order cycloadditions, and the mechanisms of enzymatic catalysis of pericyclic reactions will be described.
Chelsea Watson
Email