A yearly tradition of this Comp.Chem. lab and many others throughout our nation is to attend the Mexican Meeting on Theoretical Physical Chemistry to share news, progress and also a few drinks and laughs. This year the RMFQT was held in Puebla and although unfortunately I was not able to attend this lab was proudly represented by its current members.

As we were hanging out recently, the idea came to us at the lab to create memes in order to summarize our work. We should be writing articles but hey, we needed the break, and so we shared them with each other in our last group meeting along with a good laugh. Here are some of the funniest ones.

Last Friday we had a new graduate student when our very own Marco Antonio Diaz defended his BSc thesis on the in silico design of drug carriers based on calix[n]arenes.

Recently, the journal ACS Central Science asked me to write a viewpoint for their First Reactions section about a research article by Prof. Alán Aspuru-Guzik from Harvard University on the evolution of the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex.

The compound shown below in figure 1 is listed by Aldrich as 4,5,6,7-tetrahydroindole, but is it really? To a hardcore organic chemist it is clear that this is not an indole but a pyrrole because

Mexico City took a hard earthquake just a couple of weeks after the southern part of the country had another and 32 years to the day after the big one back in 1985 (I was seven back then). If you wanna help this is a great place to do so. The Topos (Moles) Brigade is an elite rescue team that is taking out people from the rubble not just during this disaster but anywhere in the world where they’re needed.

Last week the WATOC congress in Munich was a lot of fun. Our poster on photosynthesis had a great turnout and got a lot of positive feedback as well as many thought provoking questions. One of the highlights of my time there was seeing my former students and knowing they’re all leading successful and happy grad-student lives in Europe, I’m so very proud of them. It was great to connect with old friends and making new ones;

If you work in the field of photovoltaics or polyacene photochemistry, then you are probably aware of the Singlet Fission (SF) phenomenon. SF can be broadly described as the process where an excited singlet state decays to a couple of degenerate coupled triplet states (via a multiexcitonic state) with roughly half the energy of the original singlet state, which in principle could be centered in two neighboring molecules;

Last Friday Durbis Castillo-Pazos became officially a graduated chemist.

I began my path in computational chemistry while I still was an undergraduate student, working on my thesis under professor Cea at unam, synthesizing main group complexes with sulfur containing ligands. Quite a mouthful, I know. Therefore my first calculations dealt with obtaining Bond indexed for bidentate ligands bonded to tin, antimony and even arsenic; yes! I worked with arsenic once!

… but were afraid to ask or How I learned to stop worrying and not caring that much about hybridization. The math behind orbital hybridization is fairly simple as I’ll try to show below, but first let me give my praise once again to the formidable Linus Pauling, whose creation of this model built a bridge between quantum mechanics and chemistry;