Professor Mark Spackman, Professor of Chemistry, University of New England.
Brief CV:
Mark Spackman received his BSc in chemical physics (1976) and PhD in
theoretical chemistry (1980) from the University of Western
Australia. He arrived at the University of New England in 1987, after
completing postdoctoral studies with R.F. Stewart
(Chemistry, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1980-83), E.N. Maslen (Physics,
University of Western Australia, 1983-85) and B.M. Craven
(Crystallography, University of Pittsburgh, 1985-1986).
Professor Spackman has delivered numerous invited research lectures at recent international conferences including Gordon Research Conferences on Electron Distributions and Chemical Bonding (1995 & 1998), IUCr Congress and General Assemblies (1996, 1999 & 2002), Sagamore Conferences on Charge, Spin & Momentum Densities (1997 & 2000), the 3rd Conference of the Asian Crystallographic Association (1998), and the 19th European Crystallography Meeting (2000). In 2003 he delivered a Keynote Lecture at the 16th International Conference on the Chemistry of the Organic Solid State, and in 2004 will be an invited speaker and instructor at the 35th Erice Crystallography School. Most recently, Professor Spackman has been awarded a five-year ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship (2004-2008), which will enable him to focus full-time on his research for an extended period.
Brief summary of expertise and significant research achievements:
Professor Spackman is an internationally recognised leader in the field of
charge density analysis of accurate X-ray diffraction
data, with more than 20 years of experience and numerous key publications to
his credit. His most significant achievements
include:
* Development of a simple model for making quantitative predictions of hydrogen bond energies, followed by demonstrating its application to the extraction of intermolecular interaction energies from X-ray diffraction data. Only in the last few years have experimental methods enabled the application of these quantitative methods of analysis, and this pioneering work is becoming increasingly cited and relevant to current research.
* More recent work has provided a firm foundation for the extraction of molecular moments and intermolecular interaction energies from diffraction data, both through a key Chemical Reviews article, as well as detailed model studies published in the 1990s.
* Co-author of VALRAY (currently 56,600 lines of code), one of the two key computational packages in use throughout the world for multipole refinement of X-ray diffraction data.
* For the last decade Professor Spackman have also been pursuing ab initio computation of molecular polarizabilities, especially the critical comparison with experimental measurements and investigation of the effects of vibrational averaging. Recent work with Anthony Russell established beyond doubt the vital importance of including vibrational averaging in any quantitative comparisons with experiment.
* Since their discovery in 1996, a substantial amount of recent research in Professor Spackman's group has focused on applications of Hirshfeld surfaces, especially to crystal engineering and polymorphism in organic molecular crystals. This work is now becoming internationally recognised, as seen by invitations to present this exciting work at two important international meetings in 2003 and 2004.
Website:
http://www.une.edu.au/chemistry/research/spackman.shtml
http://www.une.edu.au/chemistry/research/spackman/
Relevant grants:
| 2004-2008 | Nonlinear optical properties of molecular crystals: An innovative approach to their determination using T high-resolution X-ray diffraction data, $615,000. |
Relevant publications:
See http://www.une.edu.au/chemistry/research/spackman/
