Joe Subotnik Professor of Chemistry

Email: subotnik AT sas DOT upenn DOT edu

Curriculum Vitae: [PDF]


Education and Honors

  • B.A. Harvard University, 2000
  • Physics and Math (summa cum laude)
  • John and Fannie Hertz Fellowship (2001-2006)
  • Ph.D. UC Berkeley, December, 2006 Biophysics
  • NSF International Research Fellow (2007 -2009), Tel-Aviv
  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University (2009-2010)

  • Air Force Young Investigator (2011)
  • Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (2012)
  • ACS HP Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2012)
  • NSF CAREER award (2012)
  • Presidential PECASE Award (2012)
  • Packard Fellow (2012)
  • Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar (2013)
  • Journal of Physical Chemistry B Lectureship (2015)
  • Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (2015)
  • Guggenheim fellowship (2016)

Mini-Biography

Joe received his BA in physics and math from Harvard in 2000 and his Ph.D. in chemical biophysics from Berkeley in 2006. Joe’s Ph.D. was done under Martin Head-Gordon and focused on local correlation theory, which is a computational approach for solving Schrodinger’s equation in a linear amount of time by exploiting the locality of many electron correlations. From 2007-2009, Joe was an NSF international postdoctoral fellowship, working with Abe Nitzan in Tel-Aviv University and jointly collaborating with Mark Ratner at Northwestern Unviersity. The fellowship research focused on understanding the role of electron-electron correlations in non-equilibrium phenomena, including molecular conduction and electron transfer. He joined Penn chemistry as a junior faculty member inJuly of 2010, and was made associate in July, 2014. For a complete list of all publications please click here.


Joe works on problems merging electronic structure and nonadiabatic dynamics. To prove he is a certified quantum chemist, consider the following picture with Klaus Ruedenberg (and Mark Ratner too!)





And here's another piece of evidence that he chooses good friends...

For Fun!

Before college, Joe Subotnik spent a summer learning number theory at the Ross summer program at Ohio State University , and he remains a big fan of the program, especially the Arnold Ross motto, "To think deeply of simple things."