Professor Chris Cramer (Fellow, Chemistry) has been named the College of Science and Engineering’s new associate dean for academic affairs, the college announced on April 9, 2013. The appointment will become effective on July 1, 2013. You can read the announcement on the chemistry department’s website.
The College of Science and Engineering has also awarded Professor Cramer with the 2013 George W. Taylor Award of Distinguished Service. This award is presented in recognition of outstanding service to the University and to the public at large. You can read more about this award on the chemistry department's website.
Professor Cramer has been an MSI Principal Investigator since he joined the University of Minnesota faculty in 1992. He was appointed a Fellow of the Institute in 1996. His research at MSI focuses on developing, coding, and applying novel and established classical and quantum-mechanical methodologies to model chemical structures, properties, and reactivities. These various phenomena are of chemical, biological, and environmental interest.
Professor Cramer is also a member of the Chemical Theory Center group in the Department of Chemistry. In Fall 2012, the group received two grants from the Department of Energy (DOE). The first of these is providing funding to create the Nanoporous Materials Genome Center (NMGC), which will study metal-organic frameworks, which are a type of nanoporous material. The other grant is funded under DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. This project involves a collaboration of the University of Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and will study excited-state processes of molecules and excited state dynamics, applying these to the use of solar energy. Professor Cramer gave an interview about these grants to MSI in Fall 2012.