Page 18 - Essentials of physical chemistry

Author

Donald D. Shillady is a native of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and an emeritus professor of
chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). He has also been an adjunct professor
of chemistry at Randolph Macon College. He has taught physical chemistry, physical chemistry
laboratory, and quantum chemistry at VCU since 1970 and still teaches ‘‘Summer P. Chem.’’ at
VCU. A graduate of Drexel University with an MS from Princeton University and industrial
experience in electrochemistry, he has been interested in optical activity and magnetically induced
optical activity since his PhD thesis at the University of Virginia in 1969. He later expanded his
research interests to the larger field of quantum chemistry.
Prof. Shillady has thoroughly enjoyed teaching physical chemistry and physical chemistry labora-
tory and has carried out experiments in the spectroscopy of optical activity as well as the computation
of optical rotatory dispersion (ORD), circular dichroism (CD), magnetic circular dichroism
(MCD), complete active space configuration interaction (CASCI) and multi-configurational
self-consistent-field (MCSCF) results. To date he has published 77 research papers, edited three
books, and completed a monograph with Professor Carl Trindle titled Electronic Structure Modeling:
Connections between Theory and Software. His other research interests include the biological effects
of electromagnetic waves, determination of the absolute configuration of large optically active
molecules, integral transform wave functions, properties of metal atom clusters, and the relationship
between valence bond and configuration interaction methods in chemistry. The PCLOBE program
accompanying this text is a subset of his programming efforts over the years as presented in the simple
Gaussian lobe basis representation. This text is his response to the reduction in requirements in
physical chemistry by the American Chemical Society at a time when U.S. students have demon-
strated lower performance in mathematics and science compared to students of other nations.
Prof. Shillady wishes to promote physical chemistry as fun, using informal language and various
mnemonics alongside basic calculus. He presents basic, ‘‘essential’’ physical chemistry in the first
10 chapters with additional material suitable for modern spectroscopy in an attempt to convey the
joy of learning clear relationships in molecular behavior. He adamantly regards the central nature of
physical chemistry as the keystone in the arch of biology, chemistry, and physics and offers his best
material used in a succinct summer course for over 30 years at VCU. This text offers the minimum
basic material and provides additional interdisciplinary material in support of his enthusiastic
promotion of physical chemistry as a central science.

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