Supervisors

Professor Baer obtained his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University (1996) and was a postdoc at the University of California Berkeley (1998). He is the incumbent of the Ratner Family Chair of Chemistry, and he is the director of the Fritz Haber Research Center of Theoretical Chemistry at the Hebrew University. He is the recipient of the Josepha and Leonid Olschwang Research Prize (Israel Academy of Science, 1998), the Klachky Prize for the Advancement of the Frontiers Science (2013), In 2015-16 he was the Pitzer Visiting Professor and the Heising-Simons Visiting Fellow of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute at the University of California Berkeley. He won the HUJI Rector’s Prize for Excellence in Research and Teaching (2017). He is the recipient of the Israel Chemical Society Prize for the Excellent Scientist (2024). Baer is a board member of the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists (WATOC). He is a member of Academia Europaea and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He was a member of the editorial boards of Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry, The Journal of Physical Chemistry of the American Chemical Society and Physical Chemistry-Chemical Physics of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Roi Baer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is a theoretical chemist, a developer of new theories and computational methods for predicting the properties of molecules, nanocrystals and, in general, materials – directly from the fundamental laws of quantum physics. His research focuses on the search of new ways for producing sustainable energy, including conversion of sunlight to electricity via solar-cells and the production of clean and efficient fuels from natural gas. Baer invented theoretical methods for treating systems considered “too difficult for density functional theory.” The most successful is the first-principles optimal-tuning of density functionals, an approach which later he and collaborator Leeor Kronik of the Weizmann Institute of Science further extended in several important directions. To date, first-principles optimal-tuning methods have enabled hundreds of scientific studies of charge carriers and optical excitations in molecules and nanocrystals. More recently, Baer and collaborators Daniel Neuhauser of UCLA and Eran Rabani of UC Berkeley invented superfast memory-compact algorithms, based on statistical polling, for predicting and manipulating the electronic structure of molecular systems of unprecedented size.