Dr. Jiri Vanicek

Biography

Jiri Vanicek’s research focuses on theoretical molecular quantum dynamics and bioinformatics. His work includes the development of efficient exact quantum, semiclassical, and mixed quantum-classical methods for nonadiabatic molecular dynamics, particularly in the context of interactions with ultrashort laser pulses. He combines these approaches with on-the-fly evaluation of electronic structure. A significant area of interest is predicting the role of small noncoding RNA molecules in disease development. Vanicek received the OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the Division of Computers in Chemistry of the American Chemical Society in 2013, and a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council in 2015. After completing his bachelor's degree in physics, summa cum laude, at Harvard in 1997, he earned his doctorate in theoretical physics under the supervision of Eric J. Heller at Harvard in 2003. He spent a semester at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and then took a postdoctoral position in theoretical chemical physics with William H. Miller at the University of California, Berkeley. Between 2005 and 2007, he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2007, Jiri Vanicek joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and was promoted to associate professor in 2014.

Research Interests