Andrey Chen — Technical Art · Lighting · VFX · 3D Art · Full portfolio in plain text · CV
Johnston Group Research
Westminster College · Johnston Research Group · Undergraduate Researcher
Before moving into games, I worked in computational chemistry. With the Johnston Research Group at Westminster College, I ran a computational study of how ammonia is lost from protonated methionine (H⁺Met), comparing two candidate pathways: a molecular rearrangement and an SN2 backside attack.
Electronic structure calculations were run in Gaussian at the B3LYP level of theory, using the 6-31G(d) and 6-311+G(d,p) basis sets. I mapped the rearrangement and the SN2 displacement step by step, located the transition states with dihedral-angle and bond-distance scans, and confirmed them with IRC calculations. The analysis found a plausible route in which sulfur attacks the carbon bonded to NH₃, forming a four-membered ring, consistent with experimental bond-dissociation data. The work was presented at the American Chemical Society National Conference, where it received an honorable mention (top 15%).
What I did
- Modeled the ground state, intermediates and transition states of the reaction in Gaussian.
- Mapped the potential energy surface with dihedral-angle and bond-distance scans.
- Verified the proposed mechanism with IRC calculations.
- Presented the results as a scientific poster at the ACS National Conference (honorable mention, top 15%).
From research to technical art
The toolkit carries straight over: building physical models, solving them numerically and checking the results against measured data is how I now approach lighting and shading, which are physics problems at heart.
Other research
At Westminster I also ran an analytical chemistry study measuring lead (Pb) in cigarette smoke by flame atomic absorption spectroscopy, comparing filtered and unfiltered cigarettes; a spike recovery of 86.26% validated the method, and t-tests compared the two conditions.
Credits
- Andrey A. Chen, Jessica C. Johnston, PhD (Westminster College), Peter B. Armentrout, PhD (University of Utah).
- Computing time provided by the University of Utah Center for High Performance Computing.
Skills: Computational Thermodynamics, Gaussian, DFT (B3LYP), Reaction Mechanisms, Scientific Poster