David Coker, PhD

David Coker is a Professor of Chemistry at Boston University and Director of the Center for Computational Science (CCS) at Hariri Institute. A fundamental goal of chemistry research is to understand how to control chemical reactions to most efficiently give desired products.  The Coker Group uses and develops new theoretical and computational methods to explore how electronic and vibrational excitation of reactant molecules in different environments can influence the outcome of chemical reactions of these molecules. Because electronic and vibrational relaxation of excited reactants is fundamentally quantum mechanical in nature,  the methods they use must accurately describe the transfer of energy between the classical environment and the quantal reactive system.