Congratulations Phillip!

Jeff C. Davis Physical Chemistry Award
http://chemistry.usf.edu/annualawards/PhillipHudson.aspx

Over the past eight years, I've accumulated quite the academic profile. My first five years were spent at Pennsylvania State University studying mathematics with a focus on graduate studies, and eventually added on medical physics. Although I learned a lot during my time there, I wanted to work in a field that combined all areas of my education and allowed me to work with theoretical concepts in practical applications. I decided to test the waters with some graduate physics courses, along with Physical Chemistry I at the University of South Florida in 2012. After completing the semester, I decided to pursue a B.S. degree in chemistry. I enrolled in Physical Chemistry II the following semester and met Dr. H Lee Woodcock, who sparked my interests in use of computational methods in chemistry and offered me a place in his research lab.

The focus of my work is a multifaceted approach to free energy simulation using Quantum Mechanical/Molecular Mechanical (QM/MM) interface calculations which allow for the speed of Molecular methods and high level energetics of Quantum methods. My research strikes the perfect balance between theoretical considerations and practical applications. Currently I implement a novel method of combining QM/MM reweighting scheme with Bennett’s Acceptance ratio for free energy computation, the Non-Boltzmann Bennett (NBB). Dr. Woodcock, two of his colleagues at the NIH and University of Vienna, and I recently had our paper on the method and it’s efficiency officially accepted by The Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, with publication soon to follow. Overall, work I do in methodology requires combining logical structure, managing a database of over ~500k files, bash scripting, and error handling. Software I use for the MM end is Harvard’s CHARMM Molecular Dynamics program, and Q-Chem for the QM evaluations. Data analysis is performed with Python scripts that I code personally.

Chemistry is by far the perfect overlap of all the areas I’ve studied. The dualistic nature of computational research gives me the freedom to delve into tedious and abstract ideas, or apply methods to investigate systems of interest. The mathematics background I have has proven to be invaluable for approaching problems from every conceivable angle, and finding the simplest and most effective methods to solving them. I hope to secure a PhD in Computational Chemistry, and eventually work in academia to research and teach the future generations what fortran 90 is, since it will probably still be used.

Overall I hope to provide ways for experimentalist to develop novel processes that are only elucidated by use of computation. I firmly believe that modern chemistry is going to take a turn where the computational will dictate the experimental, due to the cost effective and nearly limitless use of modern simulation software.

---