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The Tom Ziegler Award is presented in honour of Prof. Tom Ziegler (1945-2015) to a scientist residing in Canada who has made an outstanding early-career contribution to theoretical and/or computational chemistry.
View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners
The 2024 winner of the Tom Ziegler Award is:
Tao Zeng, MCIC
York University
Dr. Tao (Toby) Zeng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry, York University, Canada. He earned his PhD in 2011 at the University of Alberta, under the supervision of Professor Mariusz Klobukowski. He was awarded Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal for his PhD study in developing relativistic pseudopotentials for quantum chemistry calculations. Toby then joined Professor Pierre-Nicholas Roy’s group at the University of Waterloo as an NSERC and MRI-Ontario postdoctoral fellow to study microscopic superfluidity using quantum Monte Carlo simulations. In 2012, he received the Polanyi Prize for his research achievements. In 2013, Toby joined the groups of Professor Nandini Ananth and Professor Roald Hoffmann at Cornell University as a Banting postdoctoral fellow to study excited state dynamics in optoelectronics. In 2015, Toby became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Carleton University. He moved his lab to York University in 2019. Toby’s current research focuses on developing Hamiltonian formalisms for vibronic interactions and using the formalisms to simulate vibronic and relativistic effects in optoelectronic materials. His goal is to develop a unified Hamiltonian formalism for all symmetry-induced vibronic and relativistic vibronic problems. Toby has published more than 90 peer-reviewed articles. He has received numerous invitations to give seminars at universities, research institutes, and conferences. He is a member of the International Steering Committee of Jahn-Teller Effect Conferences.