Citation | Over the last two decades David Wales has shown how a novel ‘potential energy landscape’ approach can provide both a conceptual and a computational framework to address a wide range of contemporary problems in chemical physics. This work provides fundamental insight into self-organisation, which has transformed and unified our understanding of how diverse structures, including ‘magic number’ clusters, biomolecules, self- assembling mesoscopic structures, and crystals, can form spontaneously. The associated tools for exploring potential energy surfaces have revealed a variety of new reaction mechanisms and unexpected organisation principles in molecular science and soft and condensed matter. |