Chemistry welcomes Eric Neuscamman and Evan Miller ERIC NEUSCAMMAN, one of chemistry’s newest assistant professors, succinctly summarizes his research with a simple question, “How do we predict how electrons glue things together?” Neuscamman is an electronic structure theorist, a researcher in a branch of theoretical chemistry where questions about even simple molecules can, if not asked carefully, explode into computational nightmares. His job is to gain insight into fundamental topics while avoiding those nightmares. He is the oldest of three children of a Chevron petroleum geologist and a college-educated stay-at-home mother. He was born in 1984 in Denver, CO, but spent his early years in Livermore, CA. When he was five years old the family moved to Beaconsfield, England, a town to the northwest of London, almost halfway to Oxford. “In England,” says Neuscamman, “I was enrolled in an international elementary school. It had great teachers, and I remember it as a damp but positive experience.”
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His father was transferred back to Chevron headquarters, then in San Ramon, CA, so the family returned to Livermore, where Neuscamman graduated from high school in 2002 and where he lives today with his wife, Stephanie, and their two children.
This diagram highlights the possible configurations of two bonds. Some models incorrectly assign all four electrons to a single bond, leading to unrealistic bond ionization.
For college, Neuscamman attended UCLA, where he spent his first two years studying chemical engineering. “But I grew dissatisfied,” he says, “because I wanted to understand more fundamentally the physics of how electrons create molecules. I grew more interested in quantum mechanics and switched to physical chemistry.” As a third-year student he studied NMR with Yung-Ya Lin, who had earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1998 with Alex Pines. Neuscamman had enough credits to graduate in 2006 with B.S. degrees in both physical chemistry and chemical engineering, with a continued page 16/column 1
College of Chemistry, UC Berkeley