The Marcus Center Welcomes First Visiting Scholars: David Limmer and Gregory Voth
The Marcus Center welcomes its first Visiting Scholars: David T. Limmer and Gregory A. Voth. Each will hold a two-year appointment during which they will work with Marcus Center faculty and other researchers at Caltech on theoretical approaches to complex chemical systems.
David T. Limmer
David T. Limmer is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, a Research Scientist in the Materials and Chemical Sciences Divisions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Fellow of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute. He is also the founder and acting director of CECAM-US-WEST. Limmer received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 2008 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2013. From 2013 to 2016, he was an independent fellow of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. He and his group develop molecular theories of systems evolving far from equilibrium, and have advanced this effort across a broad range of disciplines including atmospheric science, energy science, biophysics, and nanoscience.
Limmer's professional contributions have been widely recognized—he is a recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award (2019) and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2021), and he has been named a Heising-Simons Fellow, Scialog Fellow, and Hellman Fellow. He has also received the Donald S. Noyce Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching (2022) and is the author of Statistical Mechanics and Stochastic Thermodynamics (2024), a graduate-level textbook on equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics.
As a Visiting Scholar, Limmer aims to develop a theory of driven quantum phase transitions that can describe the emergence of metastability under nonequilibrium perturbations and predict rates of relaxation back to their ground states.
Gregory A. Voth
Gregory A. Voth is the Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago and a Professor in both the James Franck Institute and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from Caltech in 1987 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley in 1987–89. His work has played a leading role in the development and application of theoretical and computational methods to study problems involving the structure and dynamics of complex condensed-phase systems, including proteins, membranes, liquids, and materials.
Voth's honors include the American Chemical Society's National Award in Theoretical Chemistry, the Carolyn Cohen Innovation Award from the Biophysical Society, the S. F. Boys–A. Rahman Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Chemical Society's Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids. He is a fellow of the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, Biophysical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. Voth has authored or co-authored approximately 700 peer-reviewed publications, with over 70,000 citations and an h-index of 129. He has mentored and helped place more than 225 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students and has collaborated with more than 100 experimental researchers.
As a Visiting Scholar, Voth will focus on developing and applying novel multiscale simulation methods to understand biomolecular energy transduction. While valuable in itself, this work could also inform the design and synthesis of new biomimetic energy-transducing systems at the nanoscale and beyond.