Felix Plasser, Loughborough University, UK, has been honored with the inaugural EuChemS Walter Thiel Award in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry by the EuChemS Division of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry. Plasser received the award for outstanding contributions to computational chemistry.
Walter Thiel was one of the leading European theoretical chemists of the late 20th and early 21st century. The award recognizes an outstanding scientific contribution of a young researcher based in a country affiliated with EuChemS and is granted every two years. It includes EUR 1,000 in prize money and a medal. The award is sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, the German Chemical Society (GDCh), and Chemistry Europe. It was presented at the European Conference of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (EuChemS CompChem 2023) on August 27, 2023, in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Research
Felix Plasser’s research focuses on computational photochemistry and quantum-chemical method development. He is well-known for his work on excited-state wavefunctions. The methods developed provide new conceptual information by incorporating ideas from exciton theory, valence bond theory, and excited-state aromaticity.
The corresponding software (TheoDORE) is freely available. Plasser has also contributed to the development of the COLUMBUS code for high-level electronic structure computations and the photodynamics codes Newton-X and SHARC.
Career
Felis Plasser studied chemistry at the University of Technology, Vienna, Austria, where he received his M.Sc. degree in 2009 and completed his Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry in 2012 under the supervision of Hans Lischka.
He performed postdoctoral research with Andreas Dreuw at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 2013–2015 and with Leticia Gonzalez at the University of Vienna, Austria, in 2015–2017. Since 2018, he has served as a Lecturer in Chemistry at Loughborough University. In 2023, he was named Senior Lecturer.
Selected Publications
- Energy Component Analysis for Electronically Excited States of Molecules: Why the Lowest Excited State Is Not Always the HOMO/LUMO Transition,
Patrick Kimber, Felix Plasser,
J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2023, 19, 2340–2352.
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.3c00125 - Expedient synthesis and luminescence sensing of the inositol pyrophosphate cellular messenger 5-PP-InsP5,
Megan L. Shipton, Fathima A. Jamion, Simon Wheeler, Andrew M. Riley, Felix Plasser, Barry V. L. Potter, Stephen J. Butler,
Chem. Sci. 2023, 14, 4979–4985.
https://doi.org/10.1039/d2sc06812e - Functionalisation of conjugated macrocycles with type I and II concealed antiaromaticity via cross-coupling reactions,
Troy L. R. Bennett, Adam V. Marsh, James M. Turner, Felix Plasser, Martin Heeney, Florian Glöcklhofer,
Mol. Syst. Des. Eng. 2023, 8, 713–720.
https://doi.org/10.1039/d3me00045a - Toward an understanding of electronic excitation energies beyond the molecular orbital picture,
Patrick Kimber, Felix Plasser,
Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2020, 22, 6058–6080.
https://doi.org/10.1039/D0CP00369G - Visualisation of Electronic Excited‐State Correlation in Real Space,
Felix Plasser,
ChemPhotoChem 2019, 3, 702–706.
https://doi.org/10.1002/cptc.201900014 - OpenMolcas: From Source Code to Insight,
Ignacio Fdez. Galván, Morgane Vacher, Ali Alavi, Celestino Angeli, Francesco Aquilante, Jochen Autschbach, Jie J. Bao, Sergey I. Bokarev, Nikolay A. Bogdanov, Rebecca K. Carlson, Liviu F. Chibotaru, Joel Creutzberg, Nike Dattani, Mickaël G. Delcey, Sijia S. Dong, Andreas Dreuw, Leon Freitag, Luis Manuel Frutos, Laura Gagliardi, Frédéric Gendron, Angelo Giussani, Leticia González, Gilbert Grell, Meiyuan Guo, Chad E. Hoyer, Marcus Johansson, Sebastian Keller, Stefan Knecht, Goran Kovačević, Erik Källman, Giovanni Li Manni, Marcus Lundberg, Yingjin Ma, Sebastian Mai, João Pedro Malhado, Per Åke Malmqvist, Philipp Marquetand, Stefanie A. Mewes, Jesper Norell, Massimo Olivucci, Markus Oppel, Quan Manh Phung, Kristine Pierloot, Felix Plasser, Markus Reiher, Andrew M. Sand, Igor Schapiro, Prachi Sharma, Christopher J. Stein, Lasse Kragh Sørensen, Donald G. Truhlar, Mihkel Ugandi, Liviu Ungur, Alessio Valentini, Steven Vancoillie, Valera Veryazov, Oskar Weser, Tomasz A. Wesołowski, Per-Olof Widmark, Sebastian Wouters, Alexander Zech, J. Patrick Zobel, Roland Lindh,
J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2019, 15, 5925–5964.
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.9b00532 - Universal Exciton Size in Organic Polymers is Determined by Nonlocal Orbital Exchange in Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory,
Stefanie A. Mewes, Felix Plasser, Andreas Dreuw,
J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2017, 8, 1205–1210.
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b00157 - Electronic delocalization, charge transfer and hypochromism in the UV absorption spectrum of polyadenine unravelled by multiscale computations and quantitative wavefunction analysis,
Juan J. Nogueira, Felix Plasser, Leticia González,
Chem. Sci. 2017, 8, 5682–5691.
https://doi.org/10.1039/C7SC01600J - Molcas 8: New capabilities for multiconfigurational quantum chemical calculations across the periodic table,
Francesco Aquilante, Jochen Autschbach, Rebecca K. Carlson, Liviu F. Chibotaru, Mickaël G. Delcey, Luca De Vico, Ignacio Fdez. Galván, Nicolas Ferré, Luis Manuel Frutos, Laura Gagliardi, Marco Garavelli, Angelo Giussani, Chad E. Hoyer, Giovanni Li Manni, Hans Lischka, Dongxia Ma, Per Åke Malmqvist, Thomas Müller, Artur Nenov, Massimo Olivucci, Thomas Bondo Pedersen, Daoling Peng, Felix Plasser, Ben Pritchard, Markus Reiher, Ivan Rivalta, Igor Schapiro, Javier Segarra‐Martí, Michael Stenrup, Donald G. Truhlar, Liviu Ungur, Alessio Valentini, Steven Vancoillie, Valera Veryazov, Victor P. Vysotskiy, Oliver Weingart, Felipe Zapata, Roland Lindh,
J. Comput. Chem.2015, 37, 506–541.
https://doi.org/10.1002/jcc.24221 - Surface Hopping Dynamics with Correlated Single-Reference Methods: 9H-Adenine as a Case Study,
Felix Plasser, Rachel Crespo-Otero, Marek Pederzoli, Jiri Pittner, Hans Lischka, Mario Barbatti,’
J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2014, 10, 1395–1405.
https://doi.org/10.1021/ct4011079 - The Multiradical Character of One- and Two-Dimensional Graphene Nanoribbons,
Felix Plasser, Hasan Pašalić, Martin H. Gerzabek, Florian Libisch, Rafael Reiter, Joachim Burgdörfer, Thomas Müller, Ron Shepard, Hans Lischka,
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 2581–2584.
https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201207671 - Newton‐X: a surface‐hopping program for nonadiabatic molecular dynamics,
Mario Barbatti, Matthias Ruckenbauer, Felix Plasser, Jiri Pittner, Giovanni Granucci, Maurizio Persico, Hans Lischka,
WIREs Comput. Mol. Sci. 2013, 4, 26–33.
https://doi.org/10.1002/wcms.1158 - Analysis of Excitonic and Charge Transfer Interactions from Quantum Chemical Calculations,
Felix Plasser, Hans Lischka,
J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2012, 8, 2777–2789.
https://doi.org/10.1021/ct300307c
