The Marcus Center Hosts First Annual Gatherings
The Rudolph A. Marcus Center for Theoretical Chemistry held its inaugural meeting at Caltech on July 21–22, 2025. The two-day event marked the official beginning of the Center's public programming and brought together researchers from across the country to exchange ideas and foster new collaborations in theoretical chemistry.
The meeting attracted over a hundred attendees from Caltech and a dozen universities from around the country.
The Center's Director and Bren Professor of Chemistry, Professor Garnet Chan, opened the event by sharing a video highlighting the mission of the Center. The program featured talks by leading scholars in theoretical chemistry and chemical engineering, addressing important topics such as electronic structure theory, reaction dynamics, non-equilibrium systems, and machine learning approaches in molecular modeling.
A special reception on the first day honored Professor Rudy Marcus, the Center's namesake and Nobel Laureate, in celebration of his 102nd birthday. The reception was followed by a lively poster session showcasing research by graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and staff scientists from Caltech and other institutions.
The meeting was preceded on July 18, 2025 by the Frontiers in Experimental Physical Chemistry Symposium, co-sponsored by Caltech's Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and the Marcus Center. Highlighting the interdependence of theory and experiment in chemical research, the symposium included talks by leading experimentalists from Caltech, CU Boulder, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and UW–Madison. Caltech postdocs and graduate students also participated in the event by sharing their work in a poster session following the day's talks.
The Marcus Center gratefully acknowledges the support of Dr. Mary Zi‑ping Luo and Dr. Jack Yongfeng Zhang, whose generosity has made the Center and its work possible.
