Category Archives: Group News

On April 3, 2017, senior chemistry majors Justin Gerard and Kristine Vorwerk traveled to the national American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco to present their research.   They each presented a poster.  Kristine presented on her progress using the software package Newton-X developed by the Barbatti group to calculate absorption spectra of indole, as well as calculate surface-hopping trajectories of excited-state indole.  Justin presented his conclusions about appropriate functionals to use for TD-DFT absorption and fluorescence calculations, both in the gas phase and with a state-specific solvation method.  Great work Kristine and Justin!

Justin Gerard proudly stands by his research poster at the Spring 2017 national ACS meeting in San Francisco.

Kristine Vorwerk gesticulates about science while presenting her poster at the Spring 2017 national ACS meeting in San Francisco.

The Spring 2017 semester has started, and as appropriate for the coming season, the group has sprouted in size — eight student members!

Kennerly Research Group, Spring 2017. From (left to right):  Will Magee ’19, Justin Tam ’19, Ryan Dohrn ’20, Annabel Pruitt ’20, Ethan Celebuski ’19, Kristine Vorwerk ’17, Justin Gerard ’17 and James McKee ’18

Will, Annabel and James will be working on developing our molecular dynamics simulations and analyses of Trp-containing proteins.  Justin T, Justin G, and Kristine will be working on various aspects of the quantum mechanics/dynamics of indole using Gaussian and NewtonX.   Ethan will be developing an instructional exposition on analyzing hybridization using Gaussian.   Ryan will be python scripting to support our never-ending needs for parsing and analysis.

A bit belated recognition here, but in December at the end of the fall semester, Justin Gerard ’17 and Kristine Vorwerk ’17 each presented a poster at Skidmore College’s joint Chemistry/Biology winter celebration.  Justin presented on his continued efforts to analyze functionals and basis sets for their suitability for calculating indole’s vertical absorption and emission energies, which turns out to be quite tricky business.   Kristine presented on her new focus on using a free research-grade software package called NewtonX to calculate indole’s absorption spectra with more structure than a traditional software like Gaussian typically produces.  Good work this semester!