James Thorpe Joins UF Chemistry

May 27, 2026

Professor Thorpe received his B.S. in Chemistry from The University of Texas at Austin, where he worked as an undergraduate under Professor Richard Crooks and Professor John Stanton. He then graduated with a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Florida, where he worked with Professor Stanton on high-accuracy thermochemical modeling. After graduating, Professor Thorpe joined the Mattews Group at Southern Methodist University to research reduced-scaling electronic structure theory as a Postdoctoral Fellow, before joining the Active Thermochemical Tables team at Argonne National Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Appointee under Dr. Branko Ruscic.

The Thorpe Group’s research will explore the interface between artificial intelligence techniques and quantum chemistry. The goal is to answer interesting questions such as: how can first-principles quantum theory guide ML representations of chemical reactions and phenomena in systems too complex for high-accuracy simulations? What does it take to create a ‘little chemist’ in software that can manage branching decision trees for tens of thousands of calculations at once? And can we rigorously quantify the uncertainty of a chemical simulation without access to ground truth experimental results? Professor Thorpe’s group will develop theory/software to answer these questions and apply these tools to the study of chemical reactions ranging from the formation of complex polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in flames to mechanistic investigations of organometallic catalysis in solution.