Rate My Professor Gregory Beran

Gregory Beran is Professor of Chemistry and Chemistry Graduate Advisor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Riverside. He received his B.S. in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of California, San Diego in 2000 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Beran joined the University of California, Riverside faculty in 2007 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, and became full Professor in 2018.

The research of the Beran Group centers on accurate quantum chemistry methods for the condensed phase. The group develops practical theoretical models to describe non-covalent interactions and to predict the structures and properties of molecular crystals. Key interests include understanding organic molecular packing in the solid state, molecular crystal polymorphism, and integrating computational predictions with experiments to determine challenging crystal structures. Beran has earned recognition for both his research and teaching, including the 2017 UC Riverside Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2016 Emerging Technologies in Computational Chemistry Award from the Computers in Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society, the 2012 OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the same division, and the 2011 Professor of the Year award from the University of California, Riverside Honors program. His influential publications include "Modeling Polymorphic Molecular Crystals with Electronic Structure Theory" (Chemical Reviews, 2016), "Frontiers of molecular crystal structure prediction for pharmaceuticals and functional organic materials" (Chemical Science, 2023), "Improved Description of Intra- and Intermolecular Interactions Through Dispersion-Corrected Second-Order Møller-Plesset Perturbation Theory" (Accounts of Chemical Research, 2023), and recent works such as "From polymorphs to cocrystals and salts: successfully predicting axitinib's challenging crystal forms" (Chemical Science, 2025) and "Taming tautomerism in organic crystal structure prediction" (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2025). Beran's contributions have advanced computational approaches in quantum chemistry software packages and molecular crystal prediction, as evidenced by highly cited papers like "Advances in molecular quantum chemistry contained in the Q-Chem 4 program package" (2015, over 3500 citations).