Spring 2024


Splash Biography



LAYNE FRECHETTE, UC Berkeley graduate student in Chemistry




Major: Chemistry

College/Employer: UC Berkeley

Year of Graduation: G

Picture of Layne Frechette

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Layne grew up on the East Coast, starting in South Carolina, moving to Maine, and then going to college in Rhode Island. His scientific interests also jumped around, starting in biology, moving to physics, and finally ending up in chemistry. Layne moved to Berkeley for graduate school, were he works with Professor Phill Geissler using computer simulation to study the chemistry of nanomaterials. In his free time, Layne enjoys running, hiking, playing video games, and listening to heavy metal.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

S385: Computational Chemistry in Splash Fall 18 (Nov. 04, 2018)
Although many chemists need goggles and glassware for their work, a growing number of chemists just need a computer. In this course I will introduce students to the field of computational chemistry. I will first give an overview of the different fields of computational chemistry and the kinds of problems they address. I will then focus specifically on molecular dynamics simulation, showing how we can compute the motion of atoms and molecules from their interactions, as encoded in a potential energy surface. Students will then view and interact with a molecular dynamics simulation of liquid water. I will emphasize how the behavior of water they observe in these simulations emerges from water's molecular properties. Time permitting, I will show recent applications of molecular dynamics to real research problems.