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Trifecta
Chemistry's Mark Gordon hopes to work on three different projects
while away from campus as a Fulbright Scholar.
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Mark Gordon has a plan for his four-month stay in Australia - a plan
which some would call ambitious.
"That's me," the Distinguished Professor of chemistry said.
"I have been working like this for the past 30 years, so much so
that it's become a way of life."
Gordon's way of life, is trying to cram as much as he can in a short period
of time. This time, Gordon will spend four months (February to May 2003)
at the Australian National University (ANU) as part of a Fulbright Award.
There Gordon will collaborate on research with two colleagues, Leon Radom
and Michael Collins. Each professor conducts similar types of research
in theoretical chemistry.
"I have been collaborating with Professor Radom for several years
and a recently concluded NSF (National Science Foundation) travel grant
to Australia resulted in a paper we published," Gordon said.
Gordon's collaboration with Radom currently revolves around developing
new quantum chemistry methods. He says they have proven the new method
they have developed as reliable, but…
"Now we need to show that the method is broadly applicable as well,"
Gordon said. "That would never happen while he's in Australia and
I'm here in Ames."
Gordon says the same thing about his work with Collins. He spent three
weeks last winter working with Collins, who has developed a computer code
that works with Gordon's GAMES applications.
GAMESS (General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System) is a
general ab initio quantum chemistry package that contains a popular electronic
structure suite of programs. It includes an extensive graphics program
and can compute wavefunctions with at least several levels of sophistication.
"I hope we can finish merging codes of these applications,"
Gordon said, "and show others that it will work."
Gordon's third project while in Australia will focus on scalable computing,
a project he is collaborating on with Alistair Rendell in ANU's computer
science department.
Like Collins, Rendell is working with Gordon on improving GAMESS.
"He's interested in developing more parallel code in GAMES, trying
to make it as scalable as possible," Gordon said.
On each of these projects, Gordon hopes to be able to take along graduate
students and others on his research group including Mike Schmidt, associate
scientist and a co-developer of GAMESS. Students in Gordon's group have
applied for grants from the National Science Foundation program for International
Experiences for Women.
Schmidt will likely spend two months in Australia, while each of the students
will probably be there for a month each with Gordon. Their presence will
allow Gordon's collaborations to make significant progress.
"We can't accomplish everything in four months, but we'll get a fairly
good start," he said.
These three collaborations won't be all that Gordon plans on accomplishing
while in Australia. During his stay Gordon will give a series of lectures
at ANU as well as at several other Australian universities including Sydney
University, University of Melbourne and others. He also hopes to travel
to South Korea to continue another collaboration.
"This will be a wonderful opportunity to strengthen several collaborations
in Australia," Gordon said. "I hope some of these students will
be able to go along.
"We all tend to be very focused on what is important to you as a
researcher, but it's also important that you expand your horizons and
see how others in the world approach science."
Around LAS
August 26 to September 8, 2002
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