Martin Head-Gordon

Martin Head-Gordon
Born	(1962-03-17) 17 March 1962
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	Monash University Carnegie Mellon University
Known for	Computational methods in quantum chemistry
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical chemistry Quantum chemistry Computational chemistry
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	John Pople

Martin Philip Head-Gordon (né Martin Philip Head) is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working in the area of computational quantum chemistry. He is a member of The International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

A native of Australia, Head-Gordon received his B. Sc. and M. Sc. from Monash University, followed by a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon working under the supervision of John Pople developing a number of useful techniques including the Head-Gordon-Pople scheme for the evaluation of integrals, and the orbital rotation picture of orbital optimization.

Today at Berkeley, Martin supervises a group interested in pairing methods, local correlation methods, dual-basis methods, scaled MP2 methods, new efficient algorithms, and very recently corrections to the Kohn-Sham density functional framework. Broadly speaking, wavefunction based methods are the focus of his research.

Head-Gordon is also one of the founders of Q-Chem Inc.

In 2015, Head-Gordon was elected to The National Academy of Sciences.