Stephan P. A. Sauer is a professor of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, currently serving both as head of the Physical Chemistry section and as Head of Studies for the Chemistry BSc and MSc programs. He is developing Quantum Chemistry methods and software for the simulation of molecular spectra and the interaction of materials with electro-magnetic radiation in general. He is currently PI of the Novo Nordisk Foundation project Hybrid Quantum Chemistry on Hybrid Quantum Computers.
Stephan P. A. Sauer received his MSc degree in Chemistry from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany (1988) and his PhD from the University of Odense (now University of Southern Denmark) (1993). After one year as PostDoc at IBM’s Almaden Research Centre, San Jose, USA, he returned to the University of Southern Denmark. In 1997, he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen as assistant professor. In 2000 he became associate professor and in 2014 full professor at the same institution. In 2014, he was the first recipient of the Teacher of the Year at Faculty of Science Award at the University of Copenhagen and in 2018 and 2022 elected as Teacher of the Year at the Department of Chemistry.
Her research is concerned with correlated wave function methods for the simulation of all types of molecular spectra and the interaction of molecules or materials with electro-magnetic fields or radiation in general. So far, his methods have been developed for classical high performance computers but recently his interest has been turned towards quantum computers. He is co-author of the Dalton quantum chemistry program: https://daltonprogram.org/.
He has co-authored more than 200 scientific publications, several book chapters and 2 textbooks on quantum chemistry.