This issue of Molecular Physics is dedicated to Professor Peter Robert Taylor, Director of the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI) at the University of Melbourne in Australia, on the occasion of his 60th birthday.
Peter R. Taylor was born in England in 1952 and lived there until he and his family moved to the sunnier and warmer environment of Australia in 1965. It was in Sydney that Peter completed high school and then enrolled at the University of Sydney for his undergraduate studies. He continued at Sydney for his PhD, under the direction of Noel Hush there and of Andrew Hurley at CSIRO Division of Chemical Physics in Melbourne, where Peter spent a year of his PhD. He published seven papers with Hush during his graduate career, and was also strongly influenced and guided by George Bacskay. The topics of these papers can broadly be categorized as those associated with size-extensive many-body approaches to the correlation problem, the complexities of bonding (and electronic structure in general) that one meets in studies of transition metal compounds, and the use of group theory in molecular quantum mechanics. It is noteworthy that Peter continues to contribute in all three of these areas to the present day.
After his PhD, Peter's well-known penchant for travel and international collaboration became apparent. He spent the three years following his PhD in Scandinavia and Germany (with Björn Roos and Reinhart Ahlrichs, respectively), forging scientific relationships that have been long-lasting and unquestionably productive. Peter's association with the Scandinavian quantum chemistry community led to his regular participation in the European Summerschool in Quantum Chemistry (ESQC), and his ties with the European quantum chemistry community remain strong. Scientifically, his time in Europe was spent working on multireference approaches, other correlation treatments and chemical applications of quantum chemistry.
In 1981, Peter took a position at CSIRO Division of Chemical Physics in Melbourne, but the climate for scientific research, particularly computational science, in Australia was unfavourable at the time, and he remained only a short time before his wanderlust led him to the USA in 1985, where he took a position at the ELORET institute. ELORET was located in Palo Alto, California and was associated with the NASA Ames Research Center. Thus began an extremely productive time in Peter's career, during which his name became synonymous with high-accuracy calculations and with the use of supercomputers for quantum chemistry. The gifted group of scientists at NASA Ames during that time published an impressive number of quality papers, many of which remain highly cited today. During this time, Peter also renewed a very fruitful collaboration with Jan Almlöf, who had recently moved from Oslo to Minneapolis, leading to the development of atomic natural orbitals as basis sets.
Capitalizing on his computational expertise, Peter was in 1992 appointed as a senior staff scientist at General Atomics in San Diego as well as a staff member at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. In short order, Peter was promoted to deputy director of SDSC and was appointed as a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego. Ten years later, Peter was coaxed back to Europe, where in 2002 he was appointed Royal Society Wolfson Professor of Chemistry and the Chief Scientist of the Centre for Scientific Computing at the University of Warwick in the UK. His years in Warwick gave an opportunity to renew his ties with European colleagues. Peter left England again for Australia in 2010, when he accepted a position in Melbourne as director of the new Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, a powerful force in bioinformatics and computational biology in the southern hemisphere and currently the most powerful computing facility south of the Tropic of Cancer.
Despite his association with, and service to, the supercomputing community, Peter still manages to continue working in quantum chemistry. He is a very insightful scientist, an excellent expositor of science and a valued teacher and friend. In the present issue of Molecular Physics, many of his friends and colleagues contribute to the celebration of Peter's 60th birthday by publishing their recent work in the area of theoretical and computational chemistry. We wish Peter all the best for the future and look forward to many more years of his science and friendship.