 Led by Ali Alavi, the Department of Electronic Structure Theory is concerned with the development of ab initio methods for treating correlated electronic systems, using Quantum Monte Carlo, quantum chemical and many-body methodologies.Ab initio methods (including density functional theory) will be applied to problems of interest in heterogeneous catalysis, surface chemistry, electrochemistry, and photochemistry.The Department of Solid State Spectroscopy is headed by Bernhard Keimer.