The 74^th AGM of the Sydney University Chemical Society will be held on Wednesday 10^th September in Le Fèvre Lecture Theatre 2 of the Chemistry Building on the campus of The University of Sydney. The speaker will be the President of the Society, Dr Jeffrey Reimers, from the School of Chemistry, University of Sydney.

The transport of electrons within molecules, between molecules, and through molecules are now well established processes. In this talk, the similarities between them will be highlighted, starting from the basic chemical spectroscopy of organic molecules such as benzene and pyridine, moving through inorganic charge-transfer systems such as the ruthenium mixed-valence Creutz-Taube ion, considering the spectroscopy and function of the primary charge-separation functionality responsible for biological photosynthesis, and ending with the design of molecules for possible use in the post-silicon computer age. A central aspect to all these facets of Molecular Electronics is shown to be the coupling between the motion of the active electron and nuclear motions, and the coupling between various states in which the electron can be considered to be localized on one part of the molecule. In an application, we show that the Perfect-Pairing Approximation (Coulson and Richardson 1940) that describes the observed singlet-state spectra of all aromatic molecules fails to hold for the corresponding triplet manifolds, and it is this that is responsible for the observed extreme complexity of triplet-state dynamical and spectroscopic processes. Parallel methods of analysis are applied to describe the special-pair of chlorophyll molecules that controls natural photosynthesis, leading to the development of a comprehensive model that explains the observed EPR, ENDOR, and TRIPLE spin resonance results for 30 species produced by site-directed mutagenesis, their corresponding electrochemical mid-point potentials, their absorption spectra, their highly unusual infrared spectra, and their Stark spectra. This provides the first extensive description of the mechanism of primary charge separation in photosynthesis. Finally, the related methods are used to derive analytical functions capable of describing the observed current as a function of applied voltage for conduction between electrodes through single molecules.