Jiří Vaníček earned both his bachelor’s degree and doctorate in theoretical physics at Harvard, working on uniform semiclassical approximations and quantum chaos under the supervision of Eric Heller. From 2003 to 2005, he held postdoctoral positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, and in William Miller’s group at the University of California in Berkeley, where he worked on the quantum instanton approximation for kinetic isotope effects. After that, he spent two years as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, applying methods of statistical physics to predict genes regulated by microRNAs in herpesviruses. In 2007, Jiří Vaníček joined the faculty of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he is an associate professor of theoretical physical chemistry. His current research interests include the development of efficient methods for on-the-fly ab initio semiclassical and nonadiabatic quantum dynamics, with applications to vibrationally resolved linear and ultrafast electronic spectroscopy. Jiří Vaníček received the 2013 OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry from the American Chemical Society and in 2016 was elected the Swiss representative to the International Society of Theoretical Chemical Physics. He also won the European Research Council’s Horizon 2020 Consolidator Grant.

[1] T. Begušić and J. Vaníček, “Finite-temperature, Anharmonicity, and Duschinsky Effects on the Two-dimensional Electronic Spectra from Ab Initio Thermo-field Gaussian Wavepacket Dynamics,” J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 12, 2997 (2021).

[2] N. V. Golubev, T. Begušić, and J. Vaníček, “On-the-Fly Ab Initio Semiclassical Evaluation of Electronic Coherences in Polyatomic Molecules Reveals a Simple Mechanism of Decoherence,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 083001 (2020).

[3] T. Begušić and J. Vaníček, “On-the-fly ab initio semiclassical evaluation of vibronic spectra at finite temperature,” J. Chem. Phys. 153, 024105 (2020).