Johannes Kastner

Johannes Kästner studied chemistry and got his doctorate in physics. After research stays at the Max Planck Institute for coal research with Walter Thiel and at Daresbury Laboratory, he became professor for computational chemistry at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He developed methods for free-energy sampling, umbrella integration, and investigates biochemical processes by force field and QM/MM approaches. His main focus of research, however, is the calculation of tunnelling rate...See more

Johannes Kästner studied chemistry and got his doctorate in physics. After research stays at the Max Planck Institute for coal research with Walter Thiel and at Daresbury Laboratory, he became professor for computational chemistry at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He developed methods for free-energy sampling, umbrella integration, and investigates biochemical processes by force field and QM/MM approaches. His main focus of research, however, is the calculation of tunnelling rate constants. He is the lead author of DL-FIND, a library to optimize molecular geometries and to calculate rate constants with transition state theory, the small-curvature tunnelling approximation and instanton theory. His developments broadened the scope of instanton theory to make it applicable to many chemical systems, so that it is nowadays used in diverse fields like biochemistry, catalysis, and astrochemistry. See less