Kieron Burke, Distinguished Professor in the UC Irvine departments of Chemistry and Physics & Astronomy, recently received the Pariser Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. The award recognizes Burke’s field-defining contributions to Density Functional Theory – a theory that helps explain a material’s properties based on the distribution of its electrons. “The award recognizes my work in developing DFT – one of the most widely used methods for predicting the properties of molecules and materials from quantum mechanics, as well as more recent pioneering work applying machine learning to electronic structure,” said Burke. “A central contribution was the development, with John Perdew and Matthias Ernzerhof, of the Perdew–Burke–Ernzerhof (PBE) density functional in 1996. PBE was designed by using fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, and it became one of the standard methods of computational chemistry, physics and materials science and is likely the most widely used today.” The work has helped transform quantum mechanics into something with broad applicability across the physical sciences. “I would like to acknowledge John Perdew, with whom I developed PBE. John has had an extraordinary influence on both my career and the entire field of density functional theory,” said Burke. “Most especially, I want to recognize the many outstanding graduate students and postdoctoral researchers at UCI, from both the Chemistry and Physics departments, who have contributed to this research over the years. They have been responsible for much of the creativity, hard work, and scientific progress that made these advances possible.”