Andrés Montoya-Castillo is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his PhD in Chemical Physics from Columbia University in 2016 under the supervision of David Reichman, and completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University working with Tom Markland before joining CU Boulder.

The AMC Group works at the interface of physical chemistry, applied mathematics, condensed matter physics, quantum information science, and biophysics. The group develops and applies a unified toolkit spanning dimensionality reduction techniques, Mori-Zwanzig theory, and field theories alongside numerical methods including molecular dynamics, electronic structure theory, enhanced sampling, and machine learning — all aimed at the same fundamental goal: making previously intractable simulations tractable.

Our advances lower the cost of challenging condensed-phase simulations by multiple orders of magnitude, bridging static, dynamic, and statistical descriptions of chemical systems to uncover and manipulate the mechanisms of energy, charge, and information flow in complex materials.

Selected Honors & Awards

• Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2026)
• Magomedov-Shcherbinina Research Award, University of Rochester (2026–2027)
• ACS OpenEye/Cadence Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2026)
• Sloan Research Fellowship (2026)
• Kavli Fellow (2025)
• Scialog Fellow: Quantum Matter and Information (2025)
• NSF CAREER Award (2025)
• Research & Innovation Office Faculty Fellow, University of Colorado Boulder (2025)
• Packard Fellowship (2024)
• Marinus Smith Award, University of Colorado Boulder (2024)
• DOE Early Career Award (2023)
• ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award (2023)
• Postdoctoral Fellow Award, Penn Conference in Theoretical Chemistry (2017)
• Jack Miller Award for excellence in teaching, Columbia University (2013)