Gilbert Newton Lewis was an American physical chemist and a dean of the college of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley. Lewis was best known for his discovery of the covalent bond and his concept of electron pairs; his Lewis dot structures and other contributions to valence bond theory have shaped modern theories of chemical bonding. Lewis successfully contributed to chemical thermodynamics, photochemistry, and isotope separation, and is also known for his concept of acids and bases. Lewis also researched on relativity and quantum physics, and in 1926 he coined the term "photon" for the smallest unit of radiant energy.
Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, was a German-Canadian pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals". Herzberg's main work concerned atomic and molecular spectroscopy. He is well known for using these techniques that determine the structures of diatomic and polyatomic molecules, including free radicals which are difficult to investigate in any other way, and for the chemical analysis of astronomical objects. Herzberg served as Chancellor of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada from 1973 to 1980.
Yuan Tseh Lee is a Taiwanese chemist. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and honorary director of the Nagoya University Institute for Advanced Study along with Ryoji Noyori. He was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate who, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes".
The UC Berkeley College of Chemistry is one of the fifteen schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. It houses the department of chemistry and the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Otto Stern was a German-American physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics. He was the second most nominated physicist for a Nobel Prize, with 82 nominations in the years 1925–1945, ultimately winning in 1943.
John Charles Polanyi is a German-born Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in chemical kinetics.
Martin Karplus is an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Strasbourg, France. He is also the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. Karplus received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Richard Neil Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. Throughout his career, Zare has made a considerable impact in physical chemistry and analytical chemistry, particularly through the development of laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) and the study of chemical reactions at the molecular and nanoscale level. LIF is an extremely sensitive technique with applications ranging from analytical chemistry and molecular biology to astrophysics. One of its applications was the sequencing of the human genome.
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
Reaction dynamics is a field within physical chemistry, studying why chemical reactions occur, how to predict their behavior, and how to control them. It is closely related to chemical kinetics, but is concerned with individual chemical events on atomic length scales and over very brief time periods. It considers state-to-state kinetics between reactant and product molecules in specific quantum states, and how energy is distributed between translational, vibrational, rotational, and electronic modes.
Arieh Warshel is an Israeli-American biochemist and biophysicist. He is a pioneer in computational studies on functional properties of biological molecules, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and holds the Dana and David Dornsife Chair in Chemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Narayansami Sathyamurthy is a chemist in India. He is the founding director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Mohali, Punjab, India and the President of Chemical Research Society of India.
Edgar Bright Wilson Jr. was an American chemist.
In analytical chemistry, crossed molecular beam experiments involve two beams of atoms or molecules which are collided together to study the dynamics of the chemical reaction, and can detect individual reactive collisions.
Donald Gene Truhlar is an American scientist working in theoretical and computational chemistry and chemical physics with special emphases on quantum mechanics and chemical dynamics.
Vincenzo Aquilanti is an Italian chemist, emeritus professor at the University of Perugia.
Bretislav Friedrich is a Research Group leader at the Department of Molecular Physics, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and Honorarprofessor at the Technische Universität in Berlin, Germany. He is globally recognized for his pioneering research surrounding interaction of molecules with and in electric, magnetic, and optical fields as well as on cold molecules. He was admitted to the Learned Society of the Czech Republic in 2011.
Albert Stolow is a Canadian physicist. He is the Canada Research Chair in Molecular Photonics, full professor of chemistry & biomolecular sciences and of physics, and a member of the Ottawa Institute for Systems Biology at the University of Ottawa. He is the founder and an ongoing member of the Molecular Photonics Group at the National Research Council of Canada. He is adjunct professor of Chemistry and of Physics at Queen's University in Kingston, and a Graduate Faculty Scholar in the department of physics, University of Central Florida and a Fellow of the Max-Planck-uOttawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics. In 2008, he was elected a Fellow in the American Physical Society, nominated by its Division of Chemical Physics in 2008, for contributions to ultrafast laser science as applied to molecular physics, including time-resolved studies of non-adiabatic dynamics in excited molecules, non-perturbative quantum control of molecular dynamics, and dynamics of polyatomic molecules in strong laser fields. In 2008, Stolow won the Keith Laidler Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry, for a distinguished contribution to the field of physical chemistry, recognizing early career achievement. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America for the application of ultrafast optical techniques to molecular dynamics and control, in particular, studies of molecules in strong laser fields and the development of new methods of optical quantum control. In 2013, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (Canada). In 2017, Stolow was awarded the Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics of the American Physical Society for the development of methods for probing and controlling ultrafast dynamics in polyatomic molecules, including time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy and imaging, strong field molecular ionization, and dynamic Stark quantum control. In 2018, Stolow was awarded the John C. Polanyi Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry “for excellence by a scientist carrying out research in Canada in physical, theoretical or computational chemistry or chemical physics”. In 2020, he became Chair of the Division of Chemical Physics of the American Physical Society. His group's research interests include ultrafast molecular dynamics and quantum control, time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy and imaging, strong field & attosecond physics of polyatomic molecules, and coherent non-linear optical microscopy of live cells/tissues, materials and geological samples. In 2020, Stolow launched a major new high power ultrafast laser facility at the University of Ottawa producing high energy, phase-controlled few-cycle pulses of 2 micron wavelength at 10 kHz repetition rate. These are used for High Harmonic Generation to produce bright ultrafast Soft X-ray pulses for a new Ultrafast Xray Science Laboratory.
Zdeněk Herman was a Czech physical chemist.
