Todd Martinez

Who is Todd Martinez?

Todd J. Martínez is a David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and a Professor of Photon Science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He received his B.S . from Calvin College in 1989 and his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1994. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the Fritz Haber Institute for Molecular Dynamics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel and a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA for two years prior to joining the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1996. He was named a Gutgsell Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois in 2006. He joined the Stanford faculty in 2009.

Professor Martínez is a theoretical chemist whose research focuses primarily on developing first-principles approaches to chemical reaction dynamics, starting from the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics. He is particularly interested in electronically excited states and the response of molecules to light. Reactions of electronically excited molecules often involve conical intersections, around which the potential energy surfaces have the shape of intersecting cones. He developed a method known as ab initio multiple spawning, or AIMS, which predicts the dynamic evolution of systems having conical intersections. He has created models for photoinduced isomerization in retinal, which represents the biophysical basis for vision. He has also shown how videogame hardware, especially graphical processing units, can be used to accelerate quantum chemistry simulations.