Awards

Titled Professor - 2001 - 2008

Chancellor's Professor of Chemistry

About Clifford Dykstra

Professor Dykstra received a B.S. in Physics and a B.S. in Chemistry in 1973 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976 and then joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He moved to the chemistry department at Indianapolis in 1990. Professor Dykstra's research interests are in theoretical and computational chemistry. He is interested in large-scale calculational approaches to simulate a variety of molecular phenomena, especially that of how molecules can stick without forming chemical bonds. He has contributed to the methodology used for high-level determination of the distribution of electrons in molecules and for the evaluation of properties of individual molecules. He also works on the development of models aimed at making the chemical problems associated with assembling molecules in large structures suitable for computational simulation. Over 180 research publications have resulted from this work. Professor Dykstra has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a Beckman Fellow in the Center for Advanced Study (Urbana), and a recipient of four awards for teaching excellence. He has published three texts for advanced chemistry courses, is the Editor of the Journal of Molecular Structure-Theochem, and serves on the board of two other journals.