Originally from India, Prof. Raghavachari received his Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981 working with legendary Professor John Pople (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1998). He joined Bell Laboratories as a research scientist in 1981 and later received the Distinguished Researcher Award in 1987. He joined Indiana University as a Professor of Chemistry in 2002 and was appointed as a Distinguished Professor in 2014.
Professor Raghavachari is well known for his work on the development of electron correlation theories and is the principal author of the highly successful CCSD(T) technique (1989), often called “the Gold Standard of Quantum Chemistry”. Research in his group focuses on new developments in electronic structure theory along with a broad spectrum of applications ranging from computational thermochemistry of small molecules to computational catalysis and quantum structure-based drug design. He is a pioneer in the development of fragmentation-based methods in quantum chemistry that enable quantitatively accurate studies on large molecules. He has expanded his research profile in recent years to include machine learning in quantum chemistry, and computer-aided design of fluorescent materials and receptors. He has co-authored more than 430 publications in the fields of chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and materials science, and his papers have been cited over 75,000 times (h-index=97).
Prof. Raghavachari is an elected member of the “International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science”, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on the Advisory Board of the Physical Chemistry Division of The American Chemical Society and as chair of the Theoretical Chemistry subdivision of the ACS. Over the years, he has been on the advisory editorial boards of several journals including Journal of Physical Chemistry, Journal of Materials Research, Theoretical Chemistry Accounts, and Journal of Computational Chemistry. In addition to the current award, he has won other prestigious awards including the “Davisson-Germer Prize in Surface Physics” sponsored by the American Physical Society (2009), “Distinguished Alumnus” award at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, (2014), Chemical Research Society of India Medal (2017), and the Bicentennial Medal for Distinguished and Distinctive Service, Indiana University (2020).