Stewart and Chemistry

Stewart's Page of Chemistry Stuff

This is definitely under construction.

A bland introduction:
"Why Chemistry?" I hear you ask (I don't really hear you - please just imagine that I do)
I have produced, or am producing, this page because I'm a fourth year chemistry undergraduate at the University of Sheffield. So I have to pretend at least that I enjoy chemistry and that I believe it's useful. [Actually I do, but that's a bit of a geeky thing to admit]
Recently I have grown an interest in computational chemistry, in particular computational chemistry with application towards biological and medicinal chemistry. Protein modeling, ligand docking, diversity analysis, that sort of thing.
I am currently looking for a Ph.D. placement - but I don't think I should say any more about that until I have a place sorted.

A bit about my final year project:
My final year project is part of the work into a gaussian description of molecular shape. Prospective uses include rapid molecular shape comparison and characterization, molecular docking studies, blah blah blah. You are probably bored of this paragraph already, but I'm going on undeterred. The underlying work uses gaussian functions to replace the conventional intersecting atom-centered hard spheres to describe molecules. My portion of the project involves using an arbitrary number of non-spherical (i.e. elliptical) gaussians to describe collections of atoms - say, the backbone of a protein. This involves on my part trying to understand complicated mathematical proofs and producing vast amounts of code. My code now extends to 60 pages of A4 when printed using an 8-point font. That's a fair amount of C, considering that the recommended amount of work put into our final projects for my particular degree variant is just two afternoons a week (hmm...).
This work is based upon:

Grant J.A., Pickup B.T., "A Gaussian Description of Molecular Shape", J. Phys. Chem., Vol. 99, No. 11, 3503-3510, 1995.
Grant J.A., Gallardo M.A., Pickup B.T., "A Fast Method of Molecular Shape Comparison: A Simple Application of a Gaussian Description of Molecular Shape", J. Comp. Chem., Vol. 17, No. 14, 1653-1666, 1996. [Just ignore the mistakes!]

Although having typed those references in, I find it highly unlikely that anyone reading this is going to lead a dull enough life to go and read them. Perhaps I'm wrong though...

A Selection of Annotated Chemistry Links
One thing which I find really annoying about the web is the mindless list of links that you find scattered all over the place. So bearing that in mind, but not doing anything about it, here is a list of some links that I think are useful and/or interesting with regard to chemistry (albeit only slightly).

	University of Sheffield Chemistry Department	This is my Chemistry Department.
	WebElements	A tip-top quality periodic table resource. Definitely recommended.
	VSEPR	A VSEPR tutorial
	ChemDex	Directory of Chemistry places and things
	chemsoc	The chemistry societies' network which went on-line on the 3^rd March. It contains many features; careers and conference database, daily chemistry news, teaching and learning resources, latest chemistry products, probabilitic searching, useful links.
	W Graham Richard's Research Group	A very readable overview of 'biomolecular' computational chemistry.

If you want, you can email me at: [email protected]

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times, but who really cares?

This page was created by Stewart Adcock (That's me!) on 12^th March. It may have been updated since then, but if it has I haven't altered this message. I probably forgot.