Dmitry Shalashilin

Our group research interests are focused on computational methods of quantum and classical mechanics and their applications. The goal is to develop more efficient numerical methods for simulations in chemistry and physics I was very lucky to receive my education in mathematics and science from very early age at one of the best mathematics schools in the USSR, which was and still is located in the heart of Moscow, just one block from Kremlin. My math teacher Rafail Kalmanovich Gordin is still teaching there and he is one of the most prominent teachers in Russia.
After that I graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, one of the leading Russian science universities, where research was always regarded as the most important part of education. My first research project there was purely experimental and was focused on the investigation of heat transfer by radiation in the heat shield of Russian space shuttle Buran. I did not go to see the launch of the craft in 1988, because at that time I have already moved to theoretical chemical physics. My PhD project was focused on the dynamics of atomic and molecular collisions and was supervised by Prof. M.Ya.Ovchinnikova and Prof. E.E.Nikitin. Later I worked at the Theoretical Department of Institute of Chemical Physics USSR and Russia Academy of Sciences. That time the institute was still led by Nikolay Semyonov, a Nobel prize laureate for the discovery of branched chain chemical reactions. Then I worked as a research scientist at National University of Mexico, at Oklahoma State University with Prof. D.L. Thompson on classical Molecular Dynamics simulations, at University of Massachusetts with Prof Bret Jackson on the new mechanisms of reactions on surfaces, and last but not least at Oxford University with Prof Mark Child, where we have developed new computational methods of quantum dynamics. I started in Leeds in 2007 where I have been ever since. I believe that for a scientist it is important to try many different projects and to work with many different people. I am certainly very grateful to everyone I mentioned above to many more people I was lucky to work together or simply to discuss science.