Well, the title of this post is pretty self-explanatory as well as unrelated to computational chemistry. Yesterday here at CCIQS we received new equipment for supplying liquid nitrogen to our laboratories, especially to the NMR machines which consume it a lot, and also for the X-ray diffractometers which require cooling of crystals. This new compressor replaces the old one which has long overseen its useful life.

It was your idea. You had it. Or did it have you? But suddenly, you see it wrapped around someone else’s words. You read and gasp in denying shock. This can’t be! You read again trying to find your mistake, it is clearly a mistake on your part; to find it, you search for differences, preferably major ones that reveal that the identity of this idea is different to yours. You hope to just be mistaking it for yours.

Pauli’s Exclusion Principle is a paramount concept in Quantum Mechanics which has implications from statistical mechanics to quantum chemistry, consequently, there are many different statements to summarize it depending on the forum. I occasionally joke with my students about how we learnt it in kindergarten an how we state it now at the end of our computational chemistry course.

As we approach to the end of another year, and with that the time where my office becomes covered with post-it notes so as to find my way back into work after the holidays, we celebrate another paper published!

It is with great pleasure that I’d like to announce the thesis defense of Guillermo “ Memo ” Caballero and Howard Diaz who in past days became the second and third students, respectively, to get their B.Sc. degrees with theses completed at our lab.

So many events going on and so little time to blog about. Two weeks ago, four members of this group traveled to Morelia in southern Mexico to present their research at the XIII Mexican Physical Chemistry Meeting. The next week after that, they all brought their posters back to Toluca for the internal symposium at CCIQS, where a masters student, María Eugenia, gave a small talk about her research project concerning photosynthesis in bacteria.

As far as population analysis methods goes, the Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules (QTAIM) a.k.a Atoms in Molecules (AIM) has become a popular option for defining atomic properties in molecular systems, however, its calculation is a bit tricky and maybe not as straightforward as Mulliken’s or NBO.

I had a blast last week at WATOC2014 in Santiago de Chile! It was a wonderful opportunity to find old friends, meet new ones and listen to some exciting research done around the world, as well as some of the classics such as Pekka Pyykkö, who was awarded the Schrödinger medal. I decided to share my talk on SlideShare.com but also here because I found at WATOC that many many people seem to like this little space of mine!

I inexcusably forgot to write about my visit to WATOC2014 but as they say it’s better late than never. I’ve been here in Santiago de Chile for a day and a half now attending mostly to session 5 “applications to compelling problems”. WATOC (World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists) is probably the largest conference in our speciality and some of the big names are here which makes me very nervous to present my talk!

This is my first time giving a talk at the ACS meeting so I’m a tad nervous but also excited about the possibility to listen to so many great researchers and hopefully interact with some of them, although such a massive event is hardly the best place to build a network.

Well, I only contributed with the theoretical section by doing electronic structure calculations, so it isn’t really a paper we can ascribe to this particular lab, however it is really nice to see my name in JACS along such a prominent researcher as Prof. Chad Mirkin from Northwestern University, in a work closely related to my area of research interest as macrocyclic recognition agents.