Neepa T. Maitra      Professor      Department of Physics and Astronomy      Hunter College of the City University of New York      695 Park Avenue      New York, NY 10065.      Office: 1214E HN      Telephone: 212-650-3518      Fax: 212-772-5390      Email: nmaitra@hunter.cuny.edu

Research interests: in theoretical chemical physics, largely in density functional theory, also in semiclassical methods and quantum chaos. Most recently, the emphasis has been on time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT), a method to describe electronic excitations and dynamics in atomic, molecular, chemical systems and solids. We also have several projects involving the exact-factorization approach to coupled electron-ion dynamics. This first-principles approach enables us to define exact potentials that act on the electronic and nuclear subsystems, and is the correct starting point for building approximate mixed quantum-(semi)classical methods. 
Fundamental development in TDDFT and correlated electron-ion motion: investigating properties of the exact functionals in order to guide the development of accurate approximations eg. memory-dependence, from non-adiabatic effects in the linear response regime, to how memory affects species in intense fields. This has a wide range of implications and applications: electronic excitation energies and spectra, double excitations, highly excited Rydberg states, quantum control in intense fields. The equations and the potentials in the exact-factorization approach need to be approximated for real applications, and understanding what features of the exact potentials and equations need to be captured by the approximations is important for non-adiabatic electron-ion dynamics, in the presence or absence of external fields. 

We’re grateful to our funders, now and in the past: NSF, DOE, Cottrell Scholar Program of Research Corporation, ACS PRF, Hunter College Gender Equity Program, Research Corporation of CUNY

• Want to hear more?! Come to the Telluride School on TDDFT July 2017

          Most of my Publications are available here .

My education:
     B.Sc.(Hons)   University of Otago, New Zealand    (1993). (Undergrad advisor Rob Ballagh)
     Ph.D.   Harvard University, U.S.A.    (1998).   Thesis directed by Rick Heller.
     Postdoc'ed in Bill Miller's chemical physics group at Berkeley, and in Kieron Burke's density functional theory group at Rutgers.

Group members are here

Some useful links:

Workshop on quantum and classical light-matter interactions at CUNY Graduate Center

Workshop in celebration of Mel Levy's 75th Birthday at CUNY Graduate Center

ITS at the Graduate Center CUNY

Ppt or pdf and video of some recent pedagogical lectures

Video Lectures at the CECAM School Teaching the Theory in Density Functional Theory

TDDFT and Non-Adiabatic Dynamics Lectures on TDDFT at the Cold Collisions IRTG School in July 2018 (without the movies -- email me if you would like the ppt with the embedded movies)

TDDFT tutorials at the 2018 March APS (Carsten Ullrich and myself) (without the movies -- email me if you would like the ppt with the embedded movies)

TDDFT introductory lectures at the Telluride TDDFT School in July 2017; Lecture I and Lecture II

Lecture on Peer Instruction Methods in my introductory conceptual physics class, given at ACERT workshop 2016

Ground-state DFT tutorials at the 2010 March APS (John Perdew and Kieron Burke)  

Often-used journals: Physical Review Letters, Journal of Chemical Physics, Physical Review A, Physical Review B, Chemical Physics Letters, ArXiv pre-print server
Web search: Google
Train schedules: NJ Transit NY-Trenton , Amtrak
NYC Subway: Map
News: N.Y.Times, BBC, NZ Herald ·

Shopping: https://grabyourwallet.org/

Weather: N.Y.C.

Some other favourite links:
Pictures of my littlest colleagues, and more with beloved Dida. 
Interested in math? Chris Woodward's home page
A beautiful country New Zealand (where I grew up!)