The long-term objective of Professor Goddard's research has been to describe the properties of chemical, biological, and materials systems directly from first principles (without the necessity of empirical data). To accomplish this the group has been developing new theory, new methods, and new software. The group's approach builds from Quantum Mechanics (QM) through a hierarchy of more approximate methods suitable for longer length and times scales as indicated in the figure including Molecular Dynamics (MD), mesoscale dynamics, and macroscopic dynamics. The couplings between the length scales provide the means of determining the parameters [e.g. Force Fields (FF)] essential in the coarser descriptions. This research in methods involves