Bernd Ensing first saw the light of day on February 16, 1972 in Delfzijl
(the Netherlands) and grew up in a friendly village named Wagenborgen, which
lies somewhere in the flat and green countryside of the Groningen province.
In 1990, he completed the havo at the Fivel-college in Delfzijl
and a year later he graduated at the atheneum at the same college. He moved
to Enschede to study Chemical Technology at the technical university of Twente.
Although educated to become an chemical engineer, he choose his mayor in the
field of chemical physics at the group of professor Wim Briels, who send him to
Sweden for a three-month traineeship at the computational chemistry group of professor
Kersti Hermansson, situated at the Uppsala University.
Here, he performed his first calculations and completed a study entitled "ab
initio and DFT computations of H
absorption
on reconstructed MgO(111) surfaces obtained from molecular dynamics snapshots",
which led to his first scientific publication. In August 1996, he graduated
his Master of Science with a study on argon adsorption in the pores of AlPO
-5
zeolites, which he completed partly in Hermansson's group in Uppsala and in the
chemical physics group in Enschede. Two months later he moved to Amsterdam and
started his Ph.D. study on first principles dynamics simulations of solvent effects
on chemical reactions, in the theoretical chemistry group of professor Evert Jan
Baerends, of which this thesis is the result. In November 2002, he will move
to Philadelphia to start a post-doctoral study in the group of professor Mike
Klein at the University of Pennsylvania. In the mean time he hopes to one morning
wake up and find himself being able to play as good a saxophone as Charly
Bird Parker...