CSM was honored to hear from Dr. Xiaotai Wang on Friday in his lecture on computational mechanistic studies of transitional metal-catalyzed synthetically useful organic reactions. Dr. Xiaotai Wang has been a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, since 1997. His last lecture at Mines was over 10 years ago on the synthesis of metal frameworks. Since then, Dr. Wang has been attracted to the field of computational chemistry. Dr. Wang said that he was drawn to this field because of its utility in providing insights into the designing of new molecules. He is currently researching the synthesis and of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with newer structures and a whole host of useful properties. Dr. Wang worked in a field called computational chemistry, a branch of chemistry involving computer simulations of chemical structures to assist in solving different chemical questions. Dr. Wang noted that there are two main divisions of computational quantum chemistry: wave function based and density function based.