About the Conference

The 34th Midwest Theoretical Chemistry Conference (MTCC) is being held October 5-6, 2001 at the University of Minnesota. Since this is the first Midwest Theoretical Chemistry Conference of the new century, the conference organizers have decided that it would be a good opportunity to try an experiment that would not necessarily be the best way to run the conference every year, but might be stimulating and worthwhile for special occasions.

First of all, we want this Conference to highlight the latest scientific advances in the broad domain of theoretical and computational chemistry and their application to other fields.

Second, we want to make the conference a more complete representation of the whole Midwest Theoretical Chemistry group than might be possible year after year.

In recent years the tradition has been to have talks presented by a mixture of graduate students, postdoctoral associates, and faculty, with perhaps a special bias to make room for talks by students. In fact, the Midwest Theoretical Chemistry Conferences thrive on strong participation by advanced undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs. This year though, to be different, we have adopted a format consisting of talks by senior scientists (faculty and senior researchers at government laboratories and in industry) and poster papers by senior scientists, postdoctoral associates, and students.

This format will allow all participants to gain a broader appreciation of theoretical research in the Midwest region while still allowing plenty of room for full interaction between senior and junior scientists. It is the hope that ALL active research groups from the Midwest region will participate in the MTCC 2001. Our aim is that the MTCC 2001 will be the main event of the year for all theoretical and computational chemists from the Midwest region.