Tim Clark

Tim Clark was born in southern England and studied chemistry at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he was awarded a first class honors Bachelor of Science degree in 1969. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Queen’s University Belfast in 1973 after working on the thermochemistry and solid phase properties of adamantane and diamantane derivatives. After two years as an Imperial Chemical Industries Postdoctoral Fellow in Belfast, he moved to Princeton University as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow working for Paul Schleyer in 1975. He then followed Schleyer to the Institut für Organische Chemie of the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 1976. He is currently technical Director of the Computer-Chemie-Centrum in Erlangen and Professor of Computational Chemistry at the University of Portsmouth, UK, where he is also Director of the Centre for Molecular Design. He is the author of 340 articles in scientific journals and two books, has an h-index of 47 and is the founding editor of the Journal of Molecular Modeling. In 2009, he was awarded the Klaus-Wilhelm von der Lieth Medal of the Molecular Graphics and Modeling Society. In February 2013, he held the Paul Schleyer Lecture at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

Tim Clark is a member of the Board of the Excellence Cluster Engineering of Advanced Materials in Erlangen and joint coordinator of the Research Area Multiscale Modeling and Simulation. He is coordinator of the hpCADD (High-Performance Computer-Aided Drug Design) project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education.

Tim Clark’s research areas include the development and application of quantum mechanical methods in inorganic, organic and biological chemistry, electron-transfer theory and the simulation of organic and inorganic reaction mechanisms. More recently, he has used long time-scale classical molecular-dynamics simulations to investigate a number of proteins and protein-DNA complexes involved in the resistance mechanisms of bacteria to tetracycline antibiotics and control of the bacterial restriction-methylation defence mechanism. Since 2007, his group has concentrated on developing and applying new techniques for simulating new materials and devices, particularly in the areas of solar energy conversion and organic electronics. An important aspect of this research is extending the range of applicability of quantum mechanical techniques to hundreds of thousands of atoms using supercomputers.