W.A.Goddard
Goddard joined the chemistry faculty in November 1964, where he is now Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science, and Applied Physics and Director of the Materials and Process Simulation Center (MSC).
Goddard has been and continues to be a pioneer in developing methods for quantum mechanics (QM), force fields (FF), reactive dynamics (RD), molecular dynamics (MD), and Complete Sampling predictions of protein-ligand systems.
But his focus now is more on applying these new methods to applications ranging from new electrolytes for Li anode batteries, to higher performance not-Pt fuel cells, to electrocatalytic reduction of CO2 to fuels and of N2 to NH3, to new highly active and selective agonists for GPCRs, to new high performance but green energetic materials.
Research
Professor Goddard's research has focused on describing the properties of chemical, biological, and materials systems directly from first principles (without the necessity of empirical data). To accomplish this the group has developed new theory, new methods, and new software. These methods are then applied to challenging applications usually in collaboration with experimentalists at Caltech, other universities, national laboratories, or industry.
Publications
Goddard had published 1548 peer-reviewed papers at the end of 2022 (now at ~1968) in various fields of theory methods, catalysis applications, materials applications, nanotechnology, and biotech/pharma applications.
50 were published in 2022, 99 in 2021, and 40 in 2020. 2021 was special because Springer released a volume in their Materials Science series which included ~ 40 papers given at celebrations of WAG’s birthday (4 with WAG as coauthor) and 29 chapters in which WAG summarized the science from his group over the first 52 years. Subtracting this there were 66 papers in 2021. Partly the increase in the last 3 years is that covid 19 encouraged a lot more collaborations through Zoom, which increased productivity.