Troy Van Voorhis is the Head of the MIT Chemistry Department and the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry. His research focuses on the development of new methods – primarily based on density functional theory (DFT) – that provide an accurate description of excited electron motion in molecular systems. Van Voorhis earned his Bachelor’s Degree from Rice University, and his PhD in theoretical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. After conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard, he joined the MIT Chemistry faculty in 2003, and was named Department Head in 2019. He has received many honors and awards, including being named an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow, a fellow of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has also received the MIT School of Science’s award for excellence in graduate teaching.