Dr. Jake A. Tan

• Position: Assistant Professor
• Department: Chemistry
• Office Location: Building 58, Room 004
• jtan@uwf.edu
• Campus: 850.474.2184

Biography

Dr. Jake A. Tan is an Assistant Professor at the University of West Florida. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of the Philippines – Diliman Campus in 2010. He came to Taiwan as a recipient of Academia Sinica’s Taiwan International Graduate Program (TIGP) Fellowship. Under TIGP, he was a graduate student in the Molecular Science and Technology (MST) program, a Ph.D. program offered by the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Academia Sinica, in collaboration with the Chemistry Department at National Tsing Hua University. During his Ph.D. studies, he worked on simulating the anharmonic spectrum of several proton-bound dimers under the supervision of Prof. Jer-Lai Kuo. After completing his PhD, he worked on several diabatization schemes at the Institute of Chemistry, Academia Sinica, under the guidance of Prof. Chao-Ping Hsu. He then went back to IAMS and received the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) Independent Postdoctoral Research Scholar appointment (2019 – 2020) and MOST Research Scholar appointment (2020-2022). This fellowship enabled him to investigate the vibrational signatures of peculiar ions in outer space and expand his research experience by collaborating with other researchers in Taiwan. He collaborated with Prof. Kaito Takahashi at IAMS on simulating a spectrum using quantum time-independent, quantum time-dependent, classical, and semiclassical approaches and with Prof. Man-Kit Leung at the National Taiwan University on the molecular design of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) through density functional calculations. He then joined Prof. Ka Un Lao’s group at the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) as a postdoc. At Lao’s group, he worked on developing interpolation methods for density matrices using the Grassmann manifold, which can speed up a self-consistent field (SCF) calculation by providing a better initial SCF guess. He also implemented the generalized many-body expansion (GMBE) method in the quantum chemistry software, Q-Chem.

Degrees & Institutions

Ph.D. Chemistry, National Tsing Hua University
B.S. Chemistry, University of the Philippines - Diliman Campus

Research

His research interests involve molecular simulations towards novel applications of ionic liquids, computational gas-phase spectroscopy of relevant species in astrochemistry, and the development of novel and efficient quantum chemistry methods based on Grassmann manifolds.