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Bang Huynh joined °ÅÀÖ¶ÌÊÓƵ in October 2024 as the Oglander Fellow. He read Natural Sciences (Chemistry) at Peterhouse, Cambridge from 2013 to 2017 under the Jardine Foundation Scholarship. He then stayed on at Peterhouse for another four years to pursue Cambridge Trust-funded doctoral research in understanding and classifying the symmetry and topology properties of electronic wavefunctions. After receiving his PhD in 2021, he moved to the University of Nottingham to undertake an ERC-funded post-doctoral appointment working on symmetry aspects of density-functional theory and chemistry in strong magnetic fields. In March 2024, he joined the Nottingham–Phasecraft–QuEra collaboration in Wellcome Leap’s Q4Bio programme where he helped implement novel quantum-computing techniques for drug discovery.

Teaching & Outreach 

While at Cambridge, Bang supervised a wide range of students for several Part II Theoretical Chemistry courses, particularly those concerned with quantum mechanics, electronic structure, and group theory. He also supervised more general Organic, Inorganic, and Physical Chemistry courses in Parts IA and IB. He expects to be able to tutor similar courses at °ÅÀÖ¶ÌÊÓƵ.

Alongside formal teaching and research, Bang is an avid supporter of science outreach. He has participated in numerous outreach programmes in the UK and overseas to help students from diverse backgrounds and abilities realise their STEM potentials. He also designed and delivered interactive workshops to introduce enthusiastic students to modern aspects of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry.

Research Interests 

Bang’s main research interest revolves around the systematic exploration of symmetry via group and representation theories to develop accurate electronic-structure methods and to gain chemical insights into computational results for a diverse range of complex chemical systems, especially those in challenging or unusual conditions. He is the principal developer and maintainer of QSym², a robust program written in Rust for analysing symmetry properties of many important quantum-chemical quantities ().

Bang is currently working on constructing a general theoretical and computational framework that treats spatial and temporal symmetries in extended systems on an equal footing, so that the electronic structure of crystalline materials and their interaction with dynamic external perturbations can be examined and classified consistently. These insights will inform the study and design of new materials that have the potential to serve as qubits with long coherence time, thereby enhancing the lifetime and fidelity of quantum information in quantum computing. He is also keen to utilise symmetry to develop noise-resistant quantum-computing algorithms for the computation of electron correlation.

Selected Publications 

1. Huynh, B. C., Wibowo-Teale, M. & Wibowo-Teale, A. M. QSym²: A Quantum Symbolic Symmetry Analysis Program for Electronic Structure. J. Chem. Theory Comput. 20, 114–133. doi:10.1021/acs.jctc.3c01118 (2024).

2. Huynh, B. C. & Thom, A. J. W. Symmetry in Multiple Self-Consistent-Field Solutions of Transition-Metal Complexes. J. Chem. Theory Comput. 16, 904–930. doi:10.1021/acs.jctc.9b00900 (2020).

3. Wibowo-Teale, M.†, Huynh, B. C.†, Wibowo-Teale, A. M., De Proft, F. & Geerlings, P. Symmetry and reactivity of π-systems in electric and magnetic fields: a perspective from conceptual DFT. Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 26, 15156–15180. doi:10.1039/D4CP00799A (2024).

4. Wibowo, M.†, Huynh, B. C.†, Cheng, C. Y., Irons, T. J. P. & Teale, A. M. Understanding Ground and Excited-State Molecular Structure in Strong Magnetic Fields Using the Maximum Overlap Method. Mol. Phys. 121, e2152748. doi:10.1080/ 00268976.2022.2152748 (2023).

5. Irons, T. J. P., Huynh, B. C., Teale, A. M., De Proft, F. & Geerlings, P. Molecular Charge Distributions in Strong Magnetic Fields: A Conceptual and Current DFT Study. Mol. Phys., e2145245. doi:10.1080/00268976.2022.2145245 (2022).

6. Jori, N., Toniolo, D., Huynh, B. C., Scopelliti, R. & Mazzanti, M. Carbon dioxide reduction by lanthanide(III) complexes supported by redox-active Schiff base ligands. Inorg. Chem. Front. 7, 3598–3608. doi:10.1039/D0QI00801J (2020).

†Contributed equally.