The pan-Canadian Computational Chemistry Course (PC4) Program: A collaborative approach to training graduate students in applied computational chemistry

Alireza Sadeghifar\(^{1}\), Gino DiLabio\(^{2}\), Erin Johnson\(^{1}\), Georg Schreckenbach\(^{1}\), and Tom Woo\(^{1}\)

\(^{1}\) The University of British Columbia
\(^{2}\) The University of British Columbia

Canada has a strong and close-knit theoretical and computational chemistry community in its university system. The community is small - on average, one faculty member per department per university - in comparison to other sub-disciplines in chemistry, and this makes it difficult for individual chemistry departments to offer robust computational training programs at the graduate level. The PC4 project is a collaborative approach to address this important gap in computational chemistry training at the graduate level. The project gathers faculty from institutions across Canada with the aim of developing and delivering graduate-level applied computational chemistry courses. In addition to creating a standard, high-quality, and sustainable training program in the field, students are expected to benefit from an experience that goes beyond the single instructor/single institution model and exposure to a wide the latest research. We expect the PC4 model to be extendable to students outside of Canada, thereby addressing the UN Sustainability Goals 4 and 10, Quality Education and Reduced Inequalities. This presentation will outline our approach to the PC4 project and some of the challenges we encountered.

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