This talk will begin by describing work done during my post-doctoral studies with Joseph
Subotnik where we developed an approach for directly calculating dipole-dipole
correlation functions and hence electronic spectra from swarms of semiclassical
trajectories using Tully’s fewest switches surface hopping (FSSH) algorithm. I will
describe our efforts to benchmark the method for both linear absorption and time-
resolved spectroscopy as well as other semiclassical methods, including Kubo theory and
Ehrenfest dynamics. I will end the talk by outlining some of the work that has begun in
my group at California State University, Fullerton including modeling the excited-state
dynamics of UV-filters in our eye as well as determining the mechanism of
intramolecular cyclization of radical cations produced by photoinduced electron transfer.