The Periodic Tabloid

The Chemistry Department welcomes Professor Colin Smith to the faculty where he also holds an affiliated appointment in the Molecular Biophysics Program.  He earned his BA from New York University and a PhD from the University of California San Francisco, where his research focused on protein design and developing new methods for computationally modeling protein flexibility. Prior to coming to Wesleyan, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Plank Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. There he studied protein motion at the atomic level and its implications for how biological activity is regulated.

At Wesleyan Prof. Smith will continue his work in protein dynamics, with a focus on determining the atomic-level mechanisms of how changes in regions far from the active site propagate through proteins and ultimately affect their functions.  For example, some remote mutations can cause proteins to malfunction and lead to disease. In other cases, protein engineering has discovered unusually located mutations that enhance activity, making new synthetic and therapeutic applications possible. Work by Prof. Smith and others has identified an increasing number of cases where this communication happens not through a change in the structure, but in the extent of protein motion.

Prof. Smith and his students will take a distinctly multidisciplinary approach, including computational simulation and modeling, in addition to high-resolution biophysical techniques like nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), to determine both structure and dynamics at the atomic level.  His group’s goal is to understand better how protein activity is remotely controlled by nature and ultimately enable its rational manipulation for therapeutic or synthetic applications.

Prof. Smith’s recent and near future course offerings include Practical NMR (CHEM 382), Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences (CHEM 381), and Molecular Modeling and Design (CHEM 396).

The Chemistry Department welcomes Professor Carlos Jiménez-Hoyos to the faculty as a computational chemist. He earned a BS in Chemistry from Monterrey Tech in Monterrey, Mexico and a PhD in Chemistry from Rice University, working under Gustavo Scuseria in developing computationally efficient methods to describe molecules and materials that are strongly correlated. He then moved to work with Garnet Chan at Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral scholar. There he worked, among other things, on the development of embedding methods for practical quantum chemical calculations.

At Wesleyan Prof. Jiménez-Hoyos plans to continue his work on the development of efficient, scalable methods for electronic structure to investigate chemical and physical properties on systems beyond the reach of current techniques. He is very interested in strongly correlated molecules and materials, such as molecular magnets and bioinorganic clusters. In addition, he aims to improve current computation approaches for studying heterogeneous catalysis at transition metal surfaces or nanoparticles, for which he plans to continue his work with embedding techniques. Lastly, Prof. Jiménez-Hoyos is interested in understanding the nature of delocalized excitations in molecular aggregates.

Prof. Jiménez-Hoyos will be offering the following courses in the near future: Thermodynamics, Statistical Mechanics, and Kinetics (CHEM 338) and Intro to Quantum Chemistry (CHEM 340).  He will also be a major contributor to our initiative to restructure the Introductory Chemistry Laboratory (CHEM 152).

Among the biggest recent changes in the Chemistry Department is the advancement of several of our faculty to emeritus status over the last few years.  The department wishes them well on their new adventures.

	Wallace (“Pete”) Pringle retired in 2012 after 43 years at Wesleyan.  He divides his time between Connecticut and Florida.  When he’s in the state, Pete can frequently be found around Hall-Atwater, where he still collaborates with Stew Novick’s group.
	Phil Bolton became emeritus in 2016 and still resides in West Hartford where he is devoting more time to his horticultural interests and going on hikes with his dog, Daphne.
	Also retiring in 2016, George Petersson has relocated to the Philadelphia area where he still stays scientifically active as a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at Temple University.
	Rex Pratt became emeritus at the beginning of 2017 and has returned to Melbourne, Australia, quickly becoming an expert on the local pub culture and enjoying watching a lot more international cricket.
	David Beveridge has simply moved across Lawn Avenue to assume the co-directorship of the Wasch Center for Retired Faculty.
	Al Fry, who officially retired in Jan 2017, is still an active presence in the department and has no plans to do anything else until his current group of undergraduate and master students, has graduated.