Soumen Ghosh, former graduate student, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers for his work in Prof. Frank Neese’s group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung. His goal is to develop accurate and efficient excited state electronic structure methods for open-shell chemical systems. He is developing new excited state methods for open-shell systems based on the similarity transformed equation of motion coupled cluster (STEOM-CC) approach. Conventional coupled cluster methods can only be applied to small and medium size chemical systems. However, the domain based local pair natural orbital (DLPNO) approach, developed recently by Neese and coworkers, have significantly reduced the cost of coupled cluster calculations. Soumen’s excited state methods will be combined with DLPNO approach to make them computationally more efficient. All these methods will be implemented in the computational chemistry software Orca.