About the Seminar:

Stacking interactions are ubiquitous in chemical and biological systems, impacting everything from the packing of organic electronic materials and the stereoselectivity of organic reactions to the binding of drugs. While attractive interactions between aromatic rings (so called ‘pi-stacking’ or ‘pi-pi’ interactions) have been known for decades, only recently have we begun to understand the many factors that control the strength and geometry of these interactions. I will provide an overview of our efforts to understand stacking interactions between aromatic rings as well as less conventional stacking interactions between heterocycles and protein amide backbones and Asp-Arg salt-bridges. Ultimately, I’ll introduce a a robust predictive model of the strength of stacking interactions between heterocyclic drug fragments and the aromatic amino acid side chains Phe, Tyr, and Trp. Along the way, I’ll show that molecular electric fields provide a powerful tool for understanding stacking interactions and dispel pervasive myths about heteroatom and substituent-induced changes in electrostatic potentials of aromatic systems.

About the Speaker:

Steven graduated from New College of Florida in 2002 with a B.A. in Chemistry and Physics and completed his Ph.D. working with Fritz Schaefer at the University of Georgia in 2006. He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in Ken Houl’s group at UCLA before joining the faculty at Texas A&M in 2010. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015 and named Davidson Professor of Science in 2016. He moved to his present position at the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia in January, 2017. His research group works in the area of computational physical organic chemistry studying the role of noncovalent interactions in organocatalysis, organic electronic materials, and drug design using modern tools of computational chemistry.