College News Archive
- LAS News
|
INDEX
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
Mark Gordon NEWS RELEASE
Chemistry’s Mark Gordon wins American Chemical Society award AMES, Iowa – An anonymous review committee selected by the American Chemical Society (ACS) chose Mark Gordon as the 2009 recipient of the Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research. Gordon is the Frances M. Craig Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Iowa State University and Director of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences division of Ames Laboratory. The ACS award is given annually for “outstanding achievement in the use of computers in research, development, or education in the chemical and biological sciences.” Gordon’s post-doctoral mentor at Iowa State, Klaus Ruedenberg, nominated Gordon for the award. “It’s exciting to receive this award because there are very few awards given in the area of physical chemistry,” Gordon said. “Fewer awards makes it more meaningful because there’s more competition.” In the field of computational chemistry, Gordon and his colleagues develop models to simulate chemistry, which involves three main steps. They develop mathematical models that allow them to predict chemical behaviors, they translate this into a computer program so others can use it, and they apply it to chemistry problems. Gordon also leads the group that develops GAMESS (The General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System), a program he said is at the forefront of writing highly parallel codes. Gordon said the program is developed in Ames and has approximately 150,000 users in 100 countries, including universities and government entities. He said it is one of the few non-commercial codes and can be downloaded free. He said his work on GAMESS and the computational models he developed were likely the main factors in being chosen as the award recipient. Gordon also uses computational chemistry in a few classes at Iowa State, and he and fellow colleagues hope to expand computational chemistry throughout the department’s curriculum. When Gordon was a post doctoral student at Iowa State in 1967 – 1970, he said there was one very large campus computer housed in a small building that had 256 kilobytes of memory (much less than today’s cell phones). Now, computers his department is about to purchase for computational work can hold more than 32 gigabytes of memory. “Computer memory, storage, speed and the fundamental nature of computers have changed immensely,” he said. “Because of the huge increase in computing ability, we can think about how to use this hardware to address more complex problems than we ever dreamed about 40 years ago.” -30- | ||
