Introduction

The Division of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry (DCTC) is part of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS) and as such is a European, scientific, non-political, non-profit-making, non-governmental organisation.
As a division of EuChemS, the DCTC contributes towards the strategic Aims and Objectives of the Society (see http://www.euchems.org). In addition, the Division has set down its own objectives and practices that complement and are consistent with the EuChemS Constitution and its Directives for Divisions.
The Division of Computational Chemistry is a network of societies and their scientists working within Computational and Theoretical Chemistry throughout Europe. The Division strengthens European structures in Computational and Theoretical Chemistry and gives a voice to this highly interdisciplinary field. It endeavours to establish and maintain highest quality standards in science and research, and enhances and communicates the knowledge and applicability of its field to other scientists, to wider society and in industry. The Division encourages communication and cooperation with conferences, education and training in its field.

The main event of the Division is the biennial conference which is an important gathering of the European computational and theoretical chemists since the mid-90s, see the Conferences page for more information on the next conference.

Two awards honour outstanding work in the domain: the Walter Thiel-Award for the begin of a promising scientific career (created in 2022 and handed out for the first time 2023 to Felix Plasser, Loughborough University, UK), and the lifetime-achievement award (created and handed out for the first time in 2023 to Professor Hans Lischka, Vienna, Austria).

2024 awardees are Sandra Luber (W Thiel Award) and M Yanez (lifetime achievement award)

The Division has now 32 delegates, covering most of the members states of EuChemS .The full list of delegates can be found on the Governance page.

Chair: Dr Tanja van Mourik (University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK)
Secretary: Dr Peter Reinhardt (Sorbonne University, Paris, France)
Treasurer: Dr Nadia Elghobashi-Meinhardt (University College Dublin, Ireland)

History

History of the Division

The Division was created in 1988 with Fernando Bernardi (Italy) as the first Chair. From 1988 until until 2006 the name of the Division was the Working Party for Computational Chemistry. In 2016 its name changed to the Division for Computational Chemistry and from 2016 it is called the Division for Computational and Theoretical Chemistry.

The first key activities of the Professional Network were

1. Establishment of the Conference series, called European Conference on Computational Chemistry with the first addition taking place in Nancy, France in 1994, organised by Jean-Louis Rivail. Further conferences were held in Lisbon 1997, Budapest 2000, Assisi 2002, La Londe le Maures 2004,Tale 2006, Venetia 2008, Lund 2010, Sopron 2013, Fulda 2015, Barcelona 2017 and Perugia 2019. The next conference is scheduled in 2021 in Thessaloniki, but announced now for summer 2023: https://euchems-compchem.eu/.
2. European Master on Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modeling (TCCM), launched in 2006 chaired by Manuel Yanez (Spain). Between 2010-2019 it was supported by an Erasmus Mundus grant (FPA 2010-0147, 2015-1694). The new application was also successful and now running under the supervision of Manuel Alcami (Spain) from 2020 until 2024. The European Joint Doctorate on TCCM was created a couple of years later and was supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN-EJD) (TCCM Project – 64294) for the period 2015-2019.
3. Participation in Open Science Cloud.