am a Theoretical or Computational Chemist (or Physicist, now that I worked in a Physics department, I can I suppose make that claim, but I find my thinking is much more the way a Chemist thinks than a Physicist, and besides, my last job in science was back in a Chemistry department, doing Chemistry).

Nowadays I make my living working as a system administrator for Brandorr LLC. Not as much fun as chemistry, but it's less work and pays better.

My last research job was studying combustion reactions and Terahertz spectroscopy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The combustion work involved calculating reaction rates for various intermediates (hydrogen elimination reactions from xylene radicals), and the Terahertz Spectroscopy work involved ab-initio predictions of THz spectra of various molecules (including several chemical warfare agents).

Before that I did a postdoc at the University of Sheffield, studying conducting polymers. My main work for the better part of the past decade has been on excited state geometries of phenyl-based polymers, and for the postdoc I did Hellman-Feynman calculations on Poly-Para-Phenylene (PPP), using Density Matrix Renormalizaton Group (DMRG) theory to solve the Parisier Parr Pople (PPP) hamiltonian. It's pretty interesting work, if you like this sort of thing, which I do. Although I'm no fan of Fortran (which I used to do the calculations).

f you're not a computational scientist (most people aren't) that was probably a whole lot of gibberish, and you might appreciate a less incomprehensible explanation of what I do, which follows. Right now I'm studying combustion chemistry, or what happens when things burn (mostly things that are supposed to burn, like gasoline). I sit around in front of a computer, and run calculations on various molecules that appear as intermediates in a flame, and calculate the rates at which they turn into other intermediates, so that other people in other places can get a better handle on what products (like soot) you get from burning a certain fuel mixture under certain conditions.

As far as my graduate and postdoctoral work is concerned, if you follow technology news, you've probably read about "polymer LED's" (or possibly "organic LED's", which are related), if you remember a story about researchers working on a flat-screen display that you can roll up like a piece of paper, that's probably the polymer LED people. If you haven't read any of those stores, here's a relatively recent one. Polymer LED's are made out of conducting polymers (most generally Poly Para... like you care. PPV, which is a close relative of the molecule I studied in Sheffield). What I did was write computer programs that calculate what goes on in these materials on a molecular level. I then use these calculations to explain some of the reasons they do the things they do, in the hope that these explanations will make it easier for the experimentalists to design better toys.