This lecture is named after Per-Olov Loewdin, the "father of quantum chemistry", a great scientist and teacher. He was one of the international pioneers, of quantum chemistry, and especially his work on the theory of many-particle systems in the 1950's paved the way for much of the later developments in theoretical and computational chemistry and physics. For his scientific contributions, he received numerous international prizes and several honorary doctorates. The funds for the Loewdin lectures were donated to Uppsala University in connection with the Fourth International Congress of Quantum Chemistry, which was held in Uppsala in June 1982.
The Loewdin lecture is awarded to outstanding scholars in the field of quantum chemistry to popularise the field of quantum chemistry.
As a leading expert in developing novel methods for rapidly predicting quantum properties across chemical compound space, Anatole von Lilienfeld has been contributing to emerging machine learning approaches as well as to alchemical perturbation theory. The focus of his lab lies on deepening our understanding of chemical compound space and on the acceleration of computational materials design and discovery efforts. Theories employed rely on quantum mechanics, big data, statistical mechanics, and computing.