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.

Just as last year, the “Dolphin Summer Internship Program” (Programa Delfín) has started and this time it coincided with #RealTimeChem week. Four students from various cities (and accents) around Mexico have come to our lab in Toluca in order to spend about 7 weeks of research in the field of molecular modeling and within our research of molecular recognition in biochemistry.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to give a talk to a small university in southern Mexico called ‘Universidad de la Cañada‘ in the state of Oaxaca, one of the most underprivileged states in our nation.

So the World Cup is once again on top of us. I’m not a Football (Soccer) enthusiast but I’ve got to admit that the expectation of such a large and widely covered event is pretty contagious.

On Friday May 30th, my good friend Dr. Josefina Aldeco, my wife and I, visited a children’s home in Querétaro (central Mexico) and brought them a few cool chemistry experiments for a short show. This event was promoted by a non-profit organization called “ Anímate a estudiar ” (Dare to study), namely by Mrs.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a solution for a common error regarding .fchk files that will display the error below when opened with GaussView5.0. As I expected, this error has to do with the use of diffuse functions in the basis set and is related to a change of format between Gaussian versions.

I’ve found the following error regarding the opening of .fchk files in GaussView5.0. CConnectionGFCHK::Parse_GFCHK() Missing or bad data: Alpha Orbital Energies Line Number 1234 The error is prevented to a first approximation (i.e. it at least will allow GV to open and visualize the file but other issues may arise) by opening the file and modifying the number of basis functions to equal the number of independent functions (which is lower)

So many things have happened since I last updated this blog but I will come to write on them when appropriate. Right now I’d like to share an invitation by Prof. Ponnadurai Ramasami from the University of Mauritius to the upcoming Virtual Conference on Computational Chemistry from the 1st to the 31st of August.

I always get very happy to have a new paper out there! I find it exciting but most of all liberating since it makes you feel like your work is going somewhere but most of all that it is making its way ‘out there’; there is a strong feeling of validation, I guess.

Once again as every year we celebrate our internal symposium here at CCIQS, and like every year, my students presented some of their progress with their research projects. This time, three students, from three different levels, present posters regarding some of the data they’ve obtained.