Prof Cheng-chau Chiu obtained this BSc, MSc and PhD from the Technische Universität München, Germany, in 2008, 2010, and 2015, respectively. After graduation, he worked as a postdoc at the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, before joining the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at National Sun Yat-sen Univerisity in 2020. Prof Chiu combines quantum chemical calculations with kinetic and thermodynamic modeling to study chemical reactions and phenomena of interest.

A non-negligible part of modern chemical research is dealing with computational simulations. Our group is applying methods and models from computational chemistry to study chemical systems of interest, e.g. gas sorption or catalysis and other surface processes, just to name some examples. One the one hand, we are dealing with application-oriented research. Here we use quantum chemistry programs to investigate the energy profile of a reaction and use these data to model the kinetic and the thermodynamic behavior of a system. One the other hand, we also deal with some (simple) methodological aspects of simulations, e.g., how to convert the calculated energies for a complex system into macroscopic observables in both an effective and accurate way.