Like every year for the past many decades, the annual Sanibel Symposium at St. Simons Island, Georgia, USA, brought together many of the best practitioners in the quantum chemistry field. Every year the Symposium Organizers, in collaboration with the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, award two of the most promising young researchers in the discipline with the young investigator award. 

This year’s winners were:

Professor Qingguo Meng (left), a research assistant professor at University of South Dakota, USA, for his work on electronic structure of platinum clusters and their surface chemistry. This work is of potential importance due to its application to catalysis.

Professor Nedialka Iordanova (right), an assistant professor at Georgia Southwestern University, USA, for her National Science Foundation-funded work on low-energy particle deposition on poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) surfaces. The importance of this work lies in surface chemistry on an important biocompatible polymer.

These awards stress the increasing significance of surface chemistry for today’s quantum chemists.

The proceedings of the Symposium will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, which will contain greater details of the awardees’ work.