Gustavo E. Scuseria is the Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics & Astronomy, and Professor of Materials Science & NanoEngineering at Rice University. Professor Scuseria is a U.S. citizen born in Argentina. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires in 1983. After moving to UC Berkeley in 1985, his interest in electronic structure theory steered him to the quantum chemistry field. He joined the faculty at Rice in 1989. Over the years, he has straddled between chemistry and physics, working in diverse areas ranging from coupled cluster to density functional theories and on applications to molecules, lattices, and solids.
Professor Scuseria’s main research field is computational quantum chemistry, an area where he has made seminal contributions to the development of new methodologies and their application to molecules, solids and nanoscale systems. Scuseria is also well known for his contributions to the Gaussian suite of programs, a popular software package for quantum electronic structure calculations used in academia, government and industry. He is the author of more than 400 publications that have received more than 35,000 citations. Scuseria has presented more than 300 invited lectures at national and international conferences, academic and research institutions. He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and Fellow of the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Guggenheim Foundation, and Royal Society of Chemistry. Among other distinctions, he has received the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an NSF Special Creativity Extension, and the IBM Partnership Award. He is listed as one of the most cited chemists in the world by Thomson-Reuters ISI. Scuseria is an editor of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation and has served in numerous review panels for U.S. and international funding agencies.
Research in the Scuseria group focuses on novel methods for electronic structure theory and applications to materials of importance for energy and the environment. Current interests center on symmetry breaking and restoration, projected quasiparticle theory, Hamiltonian mappings, and many body methods for fermions and bosons. Scuseria has pioneered Gaussian-orbital-based methods with periodic boundary conditions and linear scaling electronic structure methods. He has made landmark applications to graphene nanoribbons and other carbon nanostructures, intermediate-band photovoltaic materials, actinide oxides, nitrides, carbides and other metal oxides.