2022 Pople Medal awarded to Dr Lars Goerigk

Dr Lars Goerigk has been awarded the 2022 Pople Medal, awarded to young scientists in the Asia Pacific region who have distinguished themselves through pioneering and important contributions.

Dr Goerigk received the award  for his contributions to the accurate treatment of ground and excited states with density functional theory and the development of accurate and robust time-dependent double-hybrid density functionals for electronic excitation energies.

Awarded by the Asia-Pacific Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists (APATCC), the Pople Medal is named after the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate the late Sir John A. Pople.

Dr Goerigk is only the third Australian to win the medal - the highest honour for a theoretical or computational chemist  under the age of 45 in the Asia Pacific - to be presented during a plenary lecture at the next APATCC meeting in Vietnam in 2023.

Dr Goerigk received his PhD from the University of Münster in  Germany in 2011, and then worked as a postdoc at the University of Sydney.

In 2014, he moved to the University of Melbourne after receiving an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA).

In 2016, Dr Goerigk accepted an offer for a continuing position as a lecturer and in 2019, became senior lecturer in theoretical and computational quantum chemistry at the University's School of Chemistry.

His main interests are the application and development of new density functional theory methods for electronic ground and excited states.

His work has previously been recognised with a 2017 Physical Chemistry Division Lectureship at the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and the two highest Australian chemistry awards for mid-career researchers, the 2019 Le Fèvre Medal from the Australian Academy of Science and the 2020 Rennie Memorial Medal from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute.