The National Science Foundation awarded nearly half a million dollars to New Mexico State University assistant professor Alejandro Gallegos to build cost-effective molecular modeling tools that are more accessible to researchers.

Fields of study like cancer research, water treatment processes and drug delivery technologies, among others, will be able to use Classical Density Functional Theory to study molecular-scale behavior more efficiently.

Classical DFT is a statistical-mechanical theory researchers can use to predict the equilibrium structure and thermodynamic behavior of fluids and soft materials at the molecular scale.