Rate My Professor Gregory Beran

The research of the Beran Group centers on accurate quantum chemistry methods for the condensed phase. The group develops practical theoretical models to describe non-covalent interactions and to predict the structures and properties of molecular crystals. Key interests include understanding organic molecular packing in the solid state, molecular crystal polymorphism, and integrating computational predictions with experiments to determine challenging crystal structures. Beran has earned recognition for both his research and teaching, including the 2017 UC Riverside Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2016 Emerging Technologies in Computational Chemistry Award from the Computers in Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society, the 2012 OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the same division, and the 2011 Professor of the Year award from the University of California, Riverside Honors program. His influential publications include "Modeling Polymorphic Molecular Crystals with Electronic Structure Theory" (Chemical Reviews, 2016), "Frontiers of molecular crystal structure prediction for pharmaceuticals and functional organic materials" (Chemical Science, 2023), "Improved Description of Intra- and Intermolecular Interactions Through Dispersion-Corrected Second-Order Møller-Plesset Perturbation Theory" (Accounts of Chemical Research, 2023), and recent works such as "From polymorphs to cocrystals and salts: successfully predicting axitinib's challenging crystal forms" (Chemical Science, 2025) and "Taming tautomerism in organic crystal structure prediction" (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2025). Beran's contributions have advanced computational approaches in quantum chemistry software packages and molecular crystal prediction, as evidenced by highly cited papers like "Advances in molecular quantum chemistry contained in the Q-Chem 4 program package" (2015, over 3500 citations).