On Sept. 14 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named Todd J. Mart¡nez, professor of chemistry for the center of Biophysics and Computational Biology and affiliate faculty at the Beckman Institute, a 2005 MacArthur Fellow.

Mart¡nez is one of 25 individuals who will receive $500,000 in “no string attached” support over the next five years, according to a press release from the foundation.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded more than $3 billion in grants since 1978, making it one of the nation’s largest private philanthropic foundations. The MacArthur Fellows Program selects winners based on their creativity, originality and future potentials. Candidates cannot apply, but are nominated. Hence, they unaware of being nominated for the award and, if selected, they would be notified by a surprise phone call, according to the MacArthur foundation’s official Web site.

“The call can be life changing, coming as it does out of the blue and offering highly creative women and men the gift of time and the unfettered opportunity to explore, create and contribute,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation in a press release from the Chicago-based foundation.

For Mart¡nez, the phone call was indeed a life-changing experience.

“I was surprised and shocked because I had no idea that I was in the running for it,” Mart¡nez said.

His wife Cynthea E. Geerdes, associate clinical professor in the University’s college of Law and director of the law school’s Transactions and Community Economic Development Clinic shared similar feelings. “My reaction was you’ve got to be kidding-and is it taxable?” Geerdes said.

What was more surprising was the story behind this call.

“A colleague had sent me an email saying that he wanted to set up a conference call to talk about a possible new project that we would collaborate on and whether or not I would be in my office on that particular day,” Mart¡nez said.

However, instead of answering to a conference call, he received a warm congratulation from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation notifying him that he was selected as a 2005 MacArthur Fellow.

“The primary effect (from being named a MacArthur Fellow) is one of broad validation. A statement of showing great faith in what I am doing by the MacArthur Foundation. The rewarded money will clearly help us to do things much faster, and allow us to do things that we might have not done before,” Mart¡nez said.

“I learned at around 2 a.m. the day it was publicly announced that Todd Mart¡nez was awarded a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation and was so excited that I could barely sleep,” said Steven C. Zimmerman, interim head of the chemistry department and professor of chemistry and affiliate faculty at the Beckman Institute. “It is both recognition, nearly without parallel, of his creative and groundbreaking work on excited state chemical reactions and a reflection on the phenomenal faculty that my predecessors have recruited to this department.”

Mart¡nez and his team have been focusing their research on understanding the reactions of molecules since 1996. More specifically, they are studying how atoms move in space and how the energies of molecules change over time.

They began their research by trying to solve the Schrodinger equation, the fundamental equation of wave mechanics, for both the electrons and nuclei of an entire molecule so they could be able to realistically describe chemical activity.

Once they did that, they became interested in the process of exciting electrons through the absorption of light. The absorption of light is a process where electrons are heated while the nuclei remains cold and then the electrons are relaxed. Typically, the relaxation of electrons involves changing shapes and breaking bonds.

“We wanted to understand what would happen when a molecule absorbed light,” Martinez explained.

Mart¡nez and his team hope to be able to design molecules to behave in a certain way in response to light.

“Imagine molecules being preprogrammed to do certain things under specific light conditions. If you can control light, then you can transfer that control to molecular concentration. The key to this is that you are able to control light,” he added.

The majority of the research done involves computer simulations of molecules. In addition to computer simulations, experiment records are also studied.

“Experiments are critical in providing us with some baseline to be able to compare the results of this simulations in order to gain more confidence in the simulation so we can go beyond things that can be measured experimentally,” Mart¡nez said.

Although they have just scratched the surface on this topic, Mart¡nez has high hopes for the future of his research.

“In 10 to 15 years, it (will become) possible to do molecular computer-assisted designs where you can design the molecule to do a certain behavior,” he said. “Basically, it will be engineering at the molecular level.”