Photo by Chris Meyer
Srinivasan Iyengar
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Not often does a brand-spanking new professor arrive on campus with a $40,000 Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award in his or her pocket. But that’s just what Srinivasan (Srini) Iyengar, assistant professor of chemistry and physics, did when he got to Bloomington in September.
Designed to provide new faculty working in chemistry, biochemistry or chemical engineering with research support beginning with their first full-time academic appointment, the Dreyfus Award is presented by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. Nominations for the highly competitive and prestigious award are made by individual institutions. Up to 15 awards may be made in a given year. This year, out of 70 nominations, only 10 new faculty awards were given “to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances around the world.”
According to his Web site, Iyengar’s work is “on the interface of chemistry, computational physics and applied mathematics.”
OK, so where would a non-chemist/physics person find that place?
“Molecular structure and molecular motion play an important role in determining the chemical properties of systems,” explained Iyengar, a native of India. “We study molecular motion using the tools of theoretical chemistry and are particularly interested in the dynamical properties of large chemical, biological and nanotechnological systems.
“Simulating the dynamics of such systems play an important role in predicting properties, including chemical reactivity,” he continued. “To achieve this goal, we specialize in the development of new computational methods and tools that will facilitate the efficient and accurate study of chemical dynamics in such large systems.”
That is where you’ll find Iyengar and the interface of chemistry, computational physics and applied mathematics.
More specifically, Iyengar’s research has produced a new approach to studying molecular systems and their properties, called Atom-centered Density Matrix Propagation (ADMP). This approach improves upon the more limited models used previously.
The Dreyfus Award allows Iyengar to further develop the approach to treat challenging problems in studying chemical reactions that may—or may not—occur in molecular dynamics.
“Let’s take the example of enzymes in biological systems,” said Iyengar. “Enzymes provide an efficient framework for chemical reactions to occur inside our bodies.
“In biological enzyme kinetics, the complete and accurate study of enzyme reactions is an important problem. In many enzyme reactions, unexpected results have been noted recently, and these have been attributed to quantum effects of light nuclei, especially hydrogen atoms.”
Which brings us to quantum mechanics, a system or theory using the assumption that energy exists in discrete units. Iyengar’s ADMP approach has a quantum-mechanical framework.
“At the heart of quantum mechanics is a concept called wave-particle duality—a particle can be a wave and a wave can be a particle, to put it in the simplest possible terms,” said Iyengar. “So a hydrogen atom can behave like a wave in some situations and a particle in other situations.
“An important difference between a wave and particle is that waves can pass through barriers, but particles cannot do it easily. For example, it would be very ‘difficult’ for me to walk through the wall in my office. But a sound wave could penetrate through these walls.”
So, Iyengar explained, when a hydrogen atom behaves as a wave, as allowed by quantum mechanics, it can penetrate through barriers easily, which is called quantum mechanical tunneling.
“In biological enzyme reactions, such tunneling of hydrogen atoms has been known to play an important role in how reactions proceed,” he said. “And since tunneling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon, a quantum mechanics approach is required to treat such a problem.
“ADMP will be further generalized to treat these and similar problems.”
On his Web site, Iyengar quotes Albert Einstein, whom he calls the best known theoretical scientist of modern history.
“The scientific theorist is not to be envied. For nature, or more precisely experiment, is an inexorable and not very friendly judge of his work. It never says YES to a theory. In most favorable cases, it says MAYBE, and in the great majority of cases, simply NO. Probably every theory will some day experience its NO—most theories, soon after conception. “—Albert Einstein, Nov. 11, 1922.
With the Dreyfus Award, Iyengar can rest assured that, as a scientific theorist, he has already gotten at least one YES in his research career.
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