Thanks NSF

It's time for micajason.blogspot.com to actually have a post from Jason. As most of you have probably heard I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This will fund our time in Cambridge, UK from the summer of 2008 to the winter of 2010. Since my work is to credit for this move, I thought I'd share with you what I'll be working on. The title of the proposal is "Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Isolated Molecules." Originally, the title was much more intimidating. During the revision process it was toned down to make it more approachable. To give you more of a taste, here's the abstract. If you find any mistakes, don't let me know.

This project combines analytic theory and computation with the goal of elucidating connections between the statistical properties and processes of isolated, molecular systems and nonextensive statistical mechanics. Isolated molecules are routinely studied across the fields of chemistry, biology, and physics. The attention given to these systems makes them an information-rich source for the cultivation of new theory. Statistical mechanical, thermodynamic and traditional statistical kinetic treatments have been successfully applied to the investigation of isolated systems. Molecular systems can, however, deviate from traditional behavior, sometimes extremely. Deviations from theoretical prediction can manifest themselves as differences in the probability and state densities of single-particle vibrational statistics and in the kinetics and dynamics on the potential energy landscape. These deviations point to a need for more general theories describing molecular systems. Our efforts to develop such theories involve the calculation of probability and state densities for model molecular systems. Densities can be used to determine extensive and nonextensive statistical thermodynamic quantities and to model kinetics and dynamics. By comparing these properties and processes of molecules that deviate from traditional theories to those that do not, insight is gained into more general descriptions of the behavior of isolated molecules.