Personal Data
Name: Artur Nenov
Date and place of birth: 27.10.1983, Varna (Bulgaria)
Academic titles: PhD (in Theoretical Chemistry), Habilitation (Seconda Fascia)
Education, and professional experience
Artur received his diploma (dipl.-univ. chem.) in 2007 in Chemistry from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, where he also attended his PhD in Theoretical Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Regina de Vivie-Riedle. PhD in natural sciences was awarded in 2012 (summa cum laude). In 2012 year Artur joined the group of Prof. Marco Garavelli's in the Department of Chemistry "G. Ciamician" at the University of Bologna as a researcher (assegnista di ricerca). In the period 2018-19 Artur was a Junior assistant professor at the Department of industrial chemistry "T. Montanari". In Nov 2019 he was promoted to Senior assistant professor.
Scientific interests
Artur's main interest lies in the development of ab initio
techniques for simulating nonlinear electronic spectroscopy in the Visible, Ultraviolet and X-ray regimes for studying conformational dynamics in the ground state and ultrafast
excited state deactivation processes. He is a co-developer of the SPECTRON code for nonlinear spectroscopy simulations. He has been actively involved in the
formulation of new computational strategies at multiconfigurational wavefunction level (CASSCF/CASPT2) for the accurate computation of the excited state manifolds, as well as in the testing and application of the developed protocols to biologically relevant compounds
such as aromatic amino acids and DNA nucleobases.
Artur's other scientific
interests include mixed
quantum-classical dynamics simulations in gas and condensed phase.
In 2012 Artur joined the developer team of COBRAMM, a software interfacing widely known commercial and academic software for ground and excited state molecular modeling in vacuo and condensed phase, and has since contributed codes for the efficient
parallelization of numerical gradients and frequencies, algorithms
for optimizing conical intersections and minimum energy paths,
routines for automatized generation of initial conditions and a protocol for efficient non-adiabatic dynamics molecular simulations at the CASPT2 level. In 2014 Artur became a contributor to the
MOLCAS QM software package and has contributed interfaces for MOLCAS with COBRAMM and SPECTRON.
Among Artur's other interests is the study of the generic forces driving photoinduced ultrafast isomerizations mediated by conical intersections and the development of strategies for the prediction and accelerated optimization of conical intersections. This knowledge is then exploited to tailor artificial compounds with desired physico-chemical properties for technical applications as molecular switches.
Grants
From 2012-2017 Artur was involved in the ERC-project "STRucture and dynAmics of biomolecules by Two-dimensional Ultraviolet Spectroscopy (STRATUS)", financed by the Advanced Grant programme of the European Research Council (ERC-2011-AdG No. 291198) with principal investigators Prof. Giulio Cerullo from the polytechnic university of Milano and Prof. Marco Garavelli from the university of Bologna, aimed at the development of ab initio techniques for simulating nonlinear optical spectroscopy and their application to biomolecules.
Since 2018 Artur is part of the project "Theory and Simulation of Ultrafast Multidimensional Nonlinear X-ray Spectroscopy of Molecules" with principal investigator Prof. Shaul Mukamel from the university of California, Irvine. The aim is to develop protocols for the ab-initio simulation of multidimensional techniques which combine sequences of X-ray pulses, expected to provide novel probes into the dynamics of nuclei and electrons in molecules and materials. In 2021 the project was nenewed for another three years.
Since 2019 Artur is part of the Horizon2020 project "Digital Ontology-based Modelling Environment for Simulation of materials (SimDOME)", call: H2020-NMBP-TO-IND-2018-2020; Topic: DT-NMBP-09-2018, GA 814492 with principal investigator Prof. Emanuele Ghedini from the University of Bologna, with the scope of bringing together codes in materials modelling and molecular spectroscopies within operational productive environment and adapting them to the needs of non-specialized users.
Awards
In 2016 Artur awarded the Premio Eolo Scrocco by the Italian Chemical Society for his original contributions to the development and application of ab-initio methods in photochemistry.
Statistics
As of Jan. 2021 Artur has 80 publications in international scientific journals, an h-index of 26 and his work has
been cited 2300 times (according to Scopus).
