Dr. Ben Pritchard earned his B.S. in general chemistry from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). During his studies there, he also worked as an analytical chemist at Xerox Corp. After graduating from RIT, he joined the research group of Dr. Jochen Autschbach at the University at Buffalo, where his graduate research largely focused on computation of paramagnetic nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) using density functional theory.

 

Throughout his undergraduate and graduate careers, Ben was an avid hobbyist programmer, starting and abandoning many projects, including an ill-fated attempt at a linux-like package manager for Windows and an ncurses interface for PBS/Torque. The skills from these projects were, however, put to good use as a postdoc, both in developing a density-fitting library (PANACHE) while at Virginia Tech with MolSSI Director, Prof. Daniel Crawford, and in developing a vectorized electron-repulsion integral library (simint) at Georgia Tech under Prof. Edmond Chow.

Ben has a passion for programming, with a particular focus on C++, Python, and how a marriage of the two can used in forming coherent frameworks in computational chemistry. Other current interests are in computation of molecular integrals, in terms of both optimizing for performance, and in determining the accuracy of common algorithms and implementations.