SWTCC 2019

We hosted the Southwest Theoretical and Computational Chemistry 2019 meeting. Since its inception in 1984, under the leadership of Danny Yeager (Texas A&M), Bill Poirier (Texas Tech), and many other organizers, the SWTCC meetings have attracted a large audience from Southwestern States and many other places.

This year's SWTCC was held on the Norman campus of the University of Oklahoma, from the evening of Friday, October 25 through mid-day Sunday, October 27, 2019. We welcomed 70+ participants to the meeting. Our four keynote speakers:

• Christine Aikens, Kansas State University
• Elfi Kraka, Southern Methodist University
• Peter Pulay, University of Arkansas
• Tom Darden, OpenEye

and 32 invited speakers presented their latest and greatest achievements in quantum chemistry methodologies, chemical/enzyme reaction mechanisms, computational materials chemistry, computational biology, and other areas. In addition, 33 students, postdocs, and senior researchers presented cutting-edge posters. We are pleased to congratulate

• Shristi Pawnikar, University of Kansas
• Dineli Ranathunga, University of Texas at Arlington
• Zilin Song, Southern Methodist Univesity
• Matthew Swann, University of Oklahoma
• Francesco Trozzi, Southern Methodist University

on winning the Outstanding Poster Awards! We are grateful to Chief Judge Brenda Rubenstein and Judges Adelia Aquino, Shervin Fatehi, Christopher Fennell, Blaine Mooers, Jindal Shah, Daniel Tabor, and Lela Vukovic for thoroughly evaluating the posters.

This meeting was funded by generous contributions from the OU Department of Chemistry, OU College of Arts and Sciences, and OU Vice President for Research, the Hansmann group, and Q-Chem Inc.

We would like to thank all participants again for attending this year's SWTCC and engaging in stimulating scientific discussions. We also would like to thank everyone else who took notice of our meeting. We look forward to meeting you at future SWTCC meetings.

Sincerely,

Yihan Shao, OU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, yihan.shao@ou.edu

Ulrich Hansmann, OU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, uhansmann@ou.edu

Bin Wang, OU School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, wang_cbme@ou.edu