Joel Bowman

[1] Bowman spent his early years in Boston, Massachusetts, attending school in Dorchester and then moving to Brookline.

He went to California Institute of Technology for graduate school, and was advised by Donald Truhlar (as he was leaving for the University of Minnesota) to choose Aaron Kuppermann as his advisor.

In 1982-1983 he spent a sabbatical at the James Franck Institute of the University of Chicago, and worked as a consultant at Bell Laboratories in 1984.

Approximately fifty potential energy surfaces for molecules and clusters have been simulated employing his permutationally invariant polynomial method.

[3] Simulating potential energy surfaces (PESs) for reactive and non-reactive systems is of broad utility in theoretical and computational chemistry.

Development of global PESs, or surfaces spanning a broad range of nuclear coordinates, is particularly necessary for certain applications, including molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations and quantum reactive scattering calculations.

Rather than utilizing all of the internuclear distances, theoretical chemists often analytical equations for PESs by using a set of internal coordinates.

[4][5] As an example, Collins and his team developed a method employing different sets of 3N−6 internal coordinates, which they applied to analyze the H+ CH4 reaction.

Generally, the functions used in fitting potential energy surfaces to experimental and/or electronic structure theory data are based on the choice of coordinates.

However, the main focus pertains to permutations involving identical atoms, as the PES must be invariant under such transformations.

By fixing the range parameter in the Morse variable, the PES can be determined through linear least-squares fitting of computed electronic energies for the system at various structural arrangements.