S.G. Mudd Building
Stanford University
"Dynamics of Protein-Chromophore Complexes with Electronic Excitations: From Theoretical Perspective"
About the Seminar
Electronic excitations in protein-chromophore complexes and their subsequent relaxations play important roles in many biological processes such as photosynthesis, bioluminescence, and photoreception. Following their dynamics also presents various challenges in both experimental and theoretical chemistry. In this seminar, our recent efforts in tackling these problems from the theory side will be overviewed. Among the three biological processes mentioned in the above, we will first discuss the descriptions of the excitation energy transfer process in a photosynthetic system. We will see how an all-atom style semiclassical approach can be developed to trace the nonadiabatic energy transfers and what new information this approach can provide. Limitations of the approach will be examined, with explanations on the on-going improvements for overcoming the limitations. We will also see that these improvements can in fact be adopted in revealing interesting chemistry in different classes of protein complexes, with a few examples of green fluorescent protein (GFP) variants. Future prospects for studying electronically excited protein systems will be discussed as concluding remarks.
About the Speaker
Young Min Rhee received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Seoul National University in Korea in 1995. After obtaining an M.S. degree in the same university in 1997 and completing his military service duty as an air force officer by 2000, he moved to the United States to pursue his Ph.D. degree. He received it at Stanford University in 2005, where he was a Mayfield Fellow with Vijay Pande. This was followed by a postdoctoral work with Martin Head-Gordon at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, he returned to Korea to join the Chemistry faculty at POSTECH, where he was promoted as an Associate Professor in 2012. In the same year, he was also appointed as a Group Leader of the Institute for Basic Science of Korea. In 2013, he was selected as the recipient of the Korean Chemical Society Early Career Award in Physical Chemistry.