Dr. Sina Mostafanejad received his B.Sc. in Chemistry in Iran. His post-graduate studies at the University of Tehran focused on fundamental aspects of Density Functional Theory (DFT) and its applications in the calculation of magnetic properties of endohedral metallofullerenes. He was also involved in the study of low-lying electronic states of metal hydride diatomic molecules such as MgH via high-precision ab initio methods under supervision of Alireza Shayesteh. He then joined the Australian National University (ANU) where he earned his second M.Sc. in Theoretical Quantum Chemistry. At ANU, Sina developed analytical mathematical models for solving Schrödinger equations for small molecules with high-precision under supervision of Peter Gill.  After further considering the limitations of high-precision models to small systems, he became motivated to overcome this challenge. Serendipitously, a manuscript from the Eugene DePrince group at Florida State University on this topic sparked his decision to join his group as a PhD candidate.

Sina devoted his Ph.D. research toward developing reduced-density, matrix-based models for strongly correlated electrons that can deliver efficient and accurate computational methods for large-scale systems. During his Ph.D. studies he became involved with software development with PSI4 and QChem, later developing his quantum chemistry software package (OpenRDM), which was supported by The Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) with Seed and Investment Software Fellowships. As a recent FSU alumnus, Sina is excited to re-join the MolSSI team, this time as a Software Scientist, where he will share his expertise in electronic structure theory and software development with his MolSSI colleagues, the current and future Software Fellows at MolSSI, and with the rest of the scientific computing and molecular science communities.