This article was submitted by Dr. Tschumper for the CASE March 2025 Newsletter.

Dr. Greg Tschumper grew up in southeastern Minnesota and went to college about 30 miles from the family farm. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Winona State University, where he pursued majors in chemistry and mathematics. After being introduced to quantum chemistry research during an NSF REU program with Prof. Mark Hoffmann at the University of North Dakota, Dr. Tschumper went on to graduate school at the University of Georgia, where he obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry under the direction of Prof. Fritz Schaefer.

Tschumper joined the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) in 2001 after post-doctoral appointments at ETH-Zürich with Prof. Martin Quack and at Emory University with Prof. Keiji Morokuma. Tschumper was the recipient of the University of Mississippi’s Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Teacher of Freshmen in 2009 and the Faculty Achievement Award in 2015. In 2017, he became chair of the department. Tschumper was elected a full member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society, in 2020, as well as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2021. He was named the university’s recipient of the 2021 SEC Faculty Achievement Award and the 2021 Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award. The latter is the highest honor for faculty success and outstanding accomplishment in research, scholarship and creative activity at the University of Mississippi. In 2024, Dr. Tschumper joined the chemistry department at Missouri S&T, where he is currently the Donald L. Castleman/FCR Missouri Endowed Professor of Discovery.

A central theme running through Tschumper’s collaborative research program has been the computational characterization of the subtle interactions between molecules. Although very fundamental, this research has been impactful because of deliberate efforts to draw direct connections to experimental work.

Tschumper’s work on small water clusters has improved understanding of, and ability to predict, the behavior of water under different conditions. His lab has also developed the N-body:Many-body computational schemes that have facilitated the extension of accurate quantum mechanical electronic structure computations to larger clusters by recasting the traditional many-body expansion of the interaction energy into the ONIOM formalism.

He has been deeply committed to mentoring and training women and students from traditionally underrepresented groups in science. Approximately two-thirds of the students who have completed their Ph.D. dissertations, master’s theses, or undergraduate honors theses under his supervision have been women.