Martin Philip Head-Gordon (né "Martin Philip Head") is a professor of chemistry

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

 at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory conducting unclassified scientific research. It is located on the grounds of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Hills above the central campus...

 working in the area of computational quantum chemistry

Quantum chemistry

Quantum chemistry is a branch of chemistry whose primary focus is the application of quantum mechanics in physical models and experiments of chemical systems...

. He is a member of The International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science

International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science

The International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science is an international scientific learned society covering all applications of quantum theory to chemistry and chemical physics. It was created in Menton in 1967. The founding members were Raymond Daudel, Per-Olov Löwdin, Robert G. Parr, John...

.

A native of Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, Head-Gordon received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon working under the supervision of John Pople

John Pople

Sir John Anthony Pople, KBE, FRS, was a Nobel-Prize winning theoretical chemist. Born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, England, he attended Bristol Grammar School. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1943. He received his B. A. in 1946. Between 1945 and 1947 he worked at the Bristol...

 developing a number of useful techniques including the Head-Gordon-Pople scheme for the evaluation of integral

Integral

Integration is an important concept in mathematics and, together with its inverse, differentiation, is one of the two main operations in calculus...

s, 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

Walter Kohn

Walter Kohn is an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist.He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials...

-Sham density functional framework. Broadly speaking wavefunction based methods are the focus of the research.

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

Q-Chem

Q-Chem is an ab initio computational chemistry software program. Q-Chem can perform a number of general quantum chemistry calculations, including Hartree-Fock, density functional theory , coupled cluster , configuration interaction and other advanced electronic structure methods...

Inc.