Tell
Tuttle.

Reducing molecular search spaces.

Tell Tuttle is Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde. His research has long been built around the idea of reducing molecular search spaces: using computation to understand what governs molecular behaviour, narrow the possibilities, and help direct experiment towards the most promising parts of chemical space.

That philosophy has taken the group across molecular structure and self-assembly, recognition, reactivity and catalysis, and molecular properties. Electronic-structure methods and molecular simulation remain core to the way the group generates and interprets data; over time, that toolkit has expanded to include high-throughput screening, automated analysis and machine learning. The underlying aim has remained much the same: computation should not simply explain what has already happened; it should help decide what is worth trying next.

Tell studied physics and chemistry at the University of Tasmania before completing a PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University of Gothenburg with Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka. He then worked with Walter Thiel at the Max Planck Institut für Kohlenforschung in Germany before joining Strathclyde in 2007, becoming Professor of Theoretical Chemistry in 2018. He later served as Head of the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry at Strathclyde.