Martin Head-Gordon


Martin Philip Head-Gordon is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working in the area of computational quantum chemistry. He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

Education

A native of Australia, Head-Gordon received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from Monash University, followed by a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University working under the supervision of John Pople developing a number of useful techniques including the Head-Gordon-Pople scheme for the evaluation of integrals, and the orbital rotation picture of orbital optimization.

Career and research

At Berkeley, Martin supervises a group interested in pairing methods, local correlation methods, dual-basis methods, scaled MP2 methods, new efficient algorithms, and very recently corrections to the Kohn-Sham density functional framework. Broadly speaking, wavefunction based methods are the focus of his research. Head-Gordon is one of the founders of Q-Chem Inc.

Awards and honors

In 2015, Head-Gordon was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.