Todd Martinez

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Todd Martinez is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois. 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 University of Illinois in 1996. He 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.

Martinez's research has been supported by an NSF Career Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, a Research Innovation Award, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and grants from the NSF, DOE, NIH, Research Corporation, and the Human Frontiers Science Program.

[edit] Representative publications

Insights for Light-Driven Molecular Devices from Ab Initio Multiple Spawning Dynamics, T. J. Martinez, Acc. Chem. Res., 39, 119 (2006).
Competitive Decay at Two and Three-State Conical INtersections in Excited State Intramolecular Proton Transfer, J. D. Coe and T. J. Martinez, J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 127, 4560 (2005).
Conical Intersection Dynamics in Solution: The Chromophore of Green Fluorescent Protein, A. Toniolo, S. Olsen, L. Manohar, and T. J. Martínez, Faraday Disc., 127, 149 (2004).