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Andreas Copan

James L. Carmon Scholarship Award 2018

Andreas Copan, a doctoral student in chemistry, has consistently shown himself to be self-motivated, highly talented and perceptive in identifying important problems. In his years at UGA, he has developed a deep understanding of molecular electronic structure theory and wide-ranging experience in computer programming and numerical algorithms. With this combination of skills, Copan has shown how to generalize density cumulant theory for the description of electronic excited states. Researchers can use this new model to predict the spectroscopic signature of a molecule, facilitating its identification. He also created a stand-alone software package that optimizes tensor contractions and improves numerical algorithms for large matrices to increase the range of chemical systems that can be modeled with this theory. These ideas contributed to a successful research proposal recently funded by the National Science Foundation.