Ryan C. Fortenberry is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator of Chemistry at the University of Mississippi. He was previously Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Georgia Southern University beginning in 2013, earning tenure in 2018 before departure. Ryan earned a BS in Mathematics working in chemistry research with Prof. David H. Magers and a MS in Communication from Mississippi College working with Prof. Cliff Fortenberry; received a Ph.D. at Virginia Tech in Theoretical Chemistry working with Prof. T. Daniel Crawford; and was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California working under the supervision of the late Dr. Timothy J. Lee. Ryan has previously been Chair of the ACS Astrochemistry Subdivision and the Ole Miss Campus Coordinator for the Mississippi Space Grant Consortium. Ryan has over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications, received several NASA research grants, was selected as the Virginia Tech College of Science 2019-2020 Outstanding Recent Alumni Award, the Mississippi College Dr. Cliff Fortenberry Department of Communication Alumnus of the Year in 2021, has been published in Scientific American as well as featured in C&E News as well as Science News, and is the author of Complete Science Communication, a text on how to write and talk about science both to expert and non-expert audiences alike. When not doing science, Ryan enjoys the outdoors, travel, and time with family (including coaching soccer and conducting children’s choir). He has dreams of climbing the highest point in each of the 50 states.
Ryan Fortenberry
University of Mississippi
Associate Professor of Chemistry and BiochemistryTalk: "PAHsing to Compute Vibrational Spectra in the Age of JWST"
Recent developments in quantum chemistry are finally allowing the realization of quantum chemical predictions for IR spectra of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are believed to be the primary IR features observed with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). While PAHs have been theorized to exist for nearly 40 years now, only recent detections of CN-PAHs (with their large dipole moments) have conclusively shown that they can and do exist in interstellar environments. Even with this conclusive evidence, experimental IR spectra of PAHs are difficult to obtain due to PAHs’ propensity for sticking together (creating tar and soot), and the regularity of the various PAH molecules makes separating their behavior nearly impossible. However, quantum chemistry provides the spectra purely from the structure of the molecule, but molecules of this size have been effectively off-limits due to the computational cost until now. This work will highlight how emerging technologies are paving the way for predictions of fundamental PAH frequencies and how they may be linked to observations from JWST.r410@olemiss.edu