Another year is almost done and as I write my annual report I realize this year has had several milestones for me as a researcher, most of which got recorded in this blog. I published three papers in peer reviewed journals, one of which actually made the cover of J. Inclusion Phenomena , the other two were published in J. Phys. Chem. C and Eur. J. Inorg.

Theoretical evaluation of a reaction mechanism is all about finding the right transition states (TS) but there are no guarantees within the available methods to actually find the one we need. Chemical intuition in the proposal of a mechanism is paramount. Let’s remember that a TS is a critical point on a Potential Energy Surface (PES) that is a minimum in every dimension but one.

As every year this month we had the yearly Mexican Reunion on Theoretical Physical Chemistry organized by prominent researchers in the field, such as Dr. Emilio Orgaz (UNAM), Dr. Alberto Vela (CINVESTAV) and many other. Over 150 different works were presented during this edition which took place in Juriquilla, Querétaro at one of the many campuses of the National Autonomous University of Mexico scattered all around the country.

About a month ago my wife and I got invited by our good friend Dr. Ruperto Fernandez (his PhD is in transport logistics and engineering) to his final presentation for a course in managerial skills he’d taken for over six months, and while I wasn’t all that thrilled about waking up at 8 AM on a Saturday, I went to cheer my good friend and show him my sleepy support.

I’m quite late to jump on this wagon but nonetheless I’m thrilled about this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry being awarded to three awesome computational chemists: Martin Karplus (Harvard), Michael Levitt (Stanford) and Arieh Warshel (USC) for the development of computational models at the service of chemistry;

September’s issue of Scientific American is all about food; food and food science, that is. In it, there are a couple of articles on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s) and there is also this blog post in their website being in favor of GMO’s, and I for one, stand by them.

This post was inspired by this other one, featured in WordPress’ Freshly Pressed section, on how should non-scientist read a scientific paper.

I’ve been neglecting this blog a lot lately! It would seem as little or nothing is going on in our lab but it’s quite the opposite, a lot of good stuff is going on and most of the excitement comes from the results obtained by a few more interns. Alberto and Eduardo came just as the previous group of interns left. They’re both undergrad students in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Universidad de la Cañada in southern Mexico.

For the last five weeks we had guests in our lab coming from different places of the country: Tepic (west), León (Center) and Mexico City (Right in the middle!). During those five weeks they worked in the field of computational chemistry helping our research efforts with a couple of drug carrying molecules. They learned about computational chemistry and drug design; about wavefunctions and density functionals;

This week has been a happy one since four new additions to our staff have been made, at least for the summer, that is. Paulina, Eliana, Javier and Daniel have come to our lab from various different towns across the nation to spend six weeks working hard in small projects related to our lines of research; namely theoretical drug carriers design.

Today is truly a landmark in our lab because on this day, María Eugenia “ Maru ” Sandoval-Salinas has defended her thesis and has thus obtained her B. Sc. in Chemistry. She is the first student under my supervision to achieve this goal, and I hope it won’t be long until we get some more, although now the bar has been set quite high.