Professor Grimme has been mentioned as one of the most highly cited scientists in a survey of the American journal Chemical & Engineering News and the Chemical Abstract Service (CAS). An article written by Grimme in the Journal of Computational Chemistry in 2006 was particularly successful: It describes a method that provides better results in the calculation of the electronic structure of molecules. The paper has been quoted nearly 7,500 times.
Professor Grimme explains its success: "It wasn’t a particularly clever idea, but it was the first paper to make the correction in a 'generally useable way'. The other reason it’s so heavily cited is that widely used quantum chemistry software packages implemented this functional in their code rather early on.”
An improved version of the theory was published in 2010. This work is now also highly cited (about 4,200 times) and the method has become the standard worldwide for such quantum chemical calculations.
The media group Thomson-Reuters has now included Professor Grimme in the list of highly cited researchers (http://www.highlycited.com) for the third time in succession. About three thousand researchers are listed in this record because they are among the top one percent of the highly cited representatives of their subject.
Stefan Grimme has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2011. He received numerous awards including the Schrödinger Medal of the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists. In 2014, Grimme received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his outstanding research.