Hrant served as a Guest Editor with Nick Mayhall (Virginia Tech) and Amir Karton (University of New England) for a Festshrift in Journal of Physical Chemistry A honoring Professor Krishnan Raghavachari (Indiana University). The Festschrift is online at https://pubs.acs.org/toc/jpcafh/128/13.

Cristian, Andrew, and Brianna presented at the 2024 Spring Meeting of the American Chemical Society. The meeting was held in New Orleans. Cristian presented a talk; Andrew and Brianna presented posters. All three did a great job sharing their work with the community and had excellent scientific discussions with colleagues.

Brianna presented a talk titled "Density Functional Theory in Chemical Physics: Orbital-dependent Density Functionals, Hybrids and Self-interaction Correction" at the American Physical Society's March Meeting in Minneapolis.

Andrew, Abby, and Hrant attended the 2024 Gordon Research Conference on Molecular and Ionic Clusters, which was held in Ventura, CA. Abby and Andrew presented posters. Hrant was invited to be the Discussion Leader for a session on "Modeling Complex Phenomena with Atomically Defined Clusters."

Abigail and Brianna volunteered at a Mother-Daughter Science Camp at UC Merced. The camp was sponsored by the Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines. The camp is a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) outreach program that brings fourth- and fifth-grade girls and their mothers or other significant women in their lives together to conduct stimulating hands-on experiments. The program consists of sessions on biology, chemistry, math, physics, archaeology, soil science, engineering and computer science. Brianna and Abby did a great job representing the lab and campus as volunteers at this impactful program.

Congrats to Dr. Abdul Zamani, who walked at the December commencement and was hooded by Hrant!

Abigail, Andrew, and Hrant joined a team of UC Merced faculty and students at Chenoweth Elementary School as science fair judges. The team selected the top posters that will represent Chenoweth Elementary in the district science fair later this year and provided those students feedback to support their preparation for the district competition. Congrats to this year's winners!

Abdul defended his dissertation and earned his Ph.D. today! Abdul is the lab's 5th Ph.D. alum. Congratulations, Dr. Zamani!

Congrats to Abigail for passing her qualifying exam today!

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to a team lead by Hrant to develop a full proposal for the next round of Partnerships for Research and Education in Chemistry (PREC) program. The grant is titled "Planning: PREC: The UC Merced/MolSSI Chemical Computation and Theory Pathway Program" and will support a UC Merced team working with the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) to develop a partnership that could form the basis of a future submission to the Partnerships for Research and Education in Chemistry (PREC) program. Specifically, this planning grant examines and develops a Chemical Computation and Theory Pathway (CCTP) program bringing together scientists at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced), a Hispanic Serving Institution, and the NSF-CHE supported MolSSI. The planning project aims to develop the CCTP program to advance chemical computation and theory and to broaden participation of persons from underrepresented communities in the chemical research enterprise. The CCTP planning project involves three key activities: (1) in person team meetings; (2) research community discussions; and (3) periodic team member teleconference meetings. The CCTP vision develops a program enhancing diversity in the chemical sciences research and training pipeline. Hrant is the PI on the grant; Professors Liang Shi, Christine Isborn, David Strubbe, and Aurora Pribram-Jones are Co-PIs.