Rate My Professor Justin Talbot

Justin Talbot is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Clemson University. He earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Utah in 2019, working with Prof. Ryan Steele on applications and methods development for vibrational structure theory. Talbot also received B.S. degrees in Physics and Applied Mathematics from the University of Utah in 2014. Prior to his appointment at Clemson in fall 2024, he completed a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley, collaborating jointly with Prof. Martin Head-Gordon, Dr. Stephen Cotton, and Prof. Bill Miller on electronic structure theory and nonadiabatic molecular dynamics.

Dr. Talbot's research group focuses on developing computational models that integrate ab initio electronic structure theory and molecular dynamics to understand molecular-level interactions. His research interests include charge separation and recombination processes in solar energy catalysts, improving vibrational models for thermodynamic calculations in nanoporous frameworks essential for sustainable gas separation, and devising new computational methods to simulate the spectroscopic signatures of coupled electronic and nuclear dynamics. Talbot has made significant contributions to computational vibrational spectroscopy of hydrated ions and the development of efficient methods for nonadiabatic dynamics simulations within the Q-Chem software package, earning him the 2025 Nick Besley Award for excellence in computational spectroscopy. Other honors include the ACS Student Chapter TA Award in 2015, the DOW Industrial Scholar Award in 2014, and the Hypercube Scholar Award in Computational Chemistry in 2013. Key publications encompass 'A Free Energy Decomposition Analysis: Insight into Binding Thermodynamics from Absolutely Localized Molecular Orbitals' (The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2023), 'The symmetric quasi-classical model using on-the-fly time-dependent density functional theory' (Molecular Physics, 2023), 'Quantum chemical modeling of hydrogen binding in metal–organic frameworks' (Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 2024), and 'Infrared intensities of asymmetric NO stretches in OCS-(H2O)n clusters' (The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, 2015). He teaches Computational Chemistry (CH 8380) at Clemson.