Dr. Yu Zhuang (PhD 2000) has been promoted to tenure at Texas Tech University. He is co-PI of a $2,500,000 NSF Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) grant awarded to Texas Tech University to fund a project entitled "Simulations of Electronic Non-Adiabatic Dynamics for Reactions with Organic Macromolecules, Liquids, and Surfaces.
The grant provides $500,000/year support for five years to develop algorithms and software for the simulations and to apply them to a range of problems including reactions of energetic oxygen atoms with polymer surfaces on spacecraft and radiation-induced chemical bond-breaking in biomolecules such as DNA. Their research collaborators for this grant are at Iowa State University, Yale University, University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), University of Pisa (Italy) and University of Vienna (Austria).