Seminar

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Speaker

Xiaosong Li
Professor of Chemistry
University of Washington

Bio

Xiaosong Li is the Harry and Catherine Jaynne Boand Endowed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington. His research focuses on developing and applying time-dependent relativistic electronic structure theories and quantum dynamics for studying excited state chemical processes that underpin energy conversion, photocatalysis, and ultrafast spectroscopies. After completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Science and Technology of China in 1999, Li attended graduate school and received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the Wayne State University where he worked with Professor Bernhard Schlegel. He pursued his postdoctoral work at the Yale University with Prof. John C. Tully on nonadiabatic electron-nuclear dynamics. Li joined the University of Washington as Assistant Professor in the fall of 2005 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011 and to Full Professor in 2015. Xiaosong Li is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has received awards that include the UW Distinguished Teaching Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, and NSF CAREER

Abstract

The computational modeling of molecular properties requires an accurate treatment of relativistic effects and electron-nuclear coherence to fully understand the physical underpinnings of the spectroscopic signatures. In this talk, I will briefly review recent developments of time-dependent theory within the relativistic Dirac framework and electronic-nuclear orbital theory from the Li research group, followed by computational studies of several advanced molecular spectroscopies and challenging chemical processes, including X-ray absorption spectroscopy and coherent electron-protonic quantum dynamics. I will also provide a perspective on the future direction of relativistic many-body theory and quantum field theory in the broader field of chemistry.