Professor Branka Ladanyi is supported by a grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to perform theoretical studies of solvent effects on chemical reactions. This research will help to provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the factors which influence and enhance chemical reactions in solution. Professor Ladanyi plans to use a combination of integral equation approaches and computer simulations to study solvent effects on the rates of chemical reactions. The work will focus on three specific topics: 1) solvent effects on the activation barrier for torsional isomerization; 2) solvent effects on the transition state for bimolecular reactions of ions and/or polar molecules in polar solvent mixtures; and 3) dynamic solvation, i.e., the transient response of the solvent to a charge transfer electronic transition of a probe molecule.
