Kevin K. Lehmann (born September 7, 1955, in Newark, New Jersey) is an American chemist and spectroscopist at the University of Virginia, best known for his work in the area of intramolecular and collisional dynamics, and for his advances in the method of cavity ring down spectroscopy (CRDS).
Raised in Irvington, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark, Lehmann studied chemical physics and mathematics at Rutgers University's Cook College, graduating with highest honors in 1977. His undergraduate research included work in reaction dynamics with John Krenos and John Tully of Bell Laboratories, photoelectron spectroscopy with Joseph Berkowitz of Argonne National Laboratory, and raman and resonate multiphoton ionization (REMPI) spectroscopies under Professor Lionel Goodman.
Lehmann went on to receive his doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1983, and was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he was a junior fellow until 1986. Under the direction of William Klemperer, Lehmann's graduate work involved studies of highly excited vibrational states using photoacoustic spectroscopy. During his time as a fellow, he served as a visiting scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's George Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory. There he developed with Stephen Coy the technique of microwave-detected, microwave-optical double resonance, which permits the automatic assignment of complex spectra.
Appointed to the chemistry faculty of Princeton University in 1985, Lehmann received both the Henry and Camille Dreyfus Award for new faculty and the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in his first year with the university. In 1987, the university acknowledged him with the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. He was promoted to associate professor in 1991, and to full professor in 1995, the same year he was named a fellow of the American Physical Society. He received the Thomas A. Edison Patent Award in 2002 for his work in CRDS, and in 2003, was granted the Earle K. Plyler Prize in Molecular Spectroscopy.
Lehmann left Princeton in 2005 to join the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he has continued his work in development of ultrasensitive spectroscopic methods with applications in trace gas detection, as well as studies of molecular dynamics in the gas phase and superfluid helium.
Dudley Robert Herschbach is an American chemist at Harvard University. He won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes". Herschbach and Lee specifically worked with molecular beams, performing crossed molecular beam experiments that enabled a detailed molecular-level understanding of many elementary reaction processes. Herschbach is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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.
John Ross was a scientist in physical chemistry and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University.
William Esco Moerner is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Watt Wetmore Webb was an American biophysicist, known for his co-invention of multiphoton microscopy in 1990.
Eric Johnson "Rick" Heller is the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Heller is known for his work on time-dependent quantum mechanics, and also for producing digital art based on the results of his numerical calculations.
Giacinto Scoles is a European and North American chemist and physicist who is best known for his pioneering development of molecular beam methods for the study of weak van der Waals forces between atoms, molecules, and surfaces. He developed the cryogenic bolometer as a universal detector of atomic and molecule beams that not only can detect a small flux of molecules, but also responds to the internal energy of the molecules. This is the basis for the optothermal spectroscopy technique which Scoles and others have used to obtain very high signal-to noise and high resolution ro-vibrational spectra.
Edgar Bright Wilson Jr. was an American chemist.
Richard J. Saykally is an American chemist. He is currently the Class of 1932 Endowed Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He has received numerous awards for his research on the molecular characteristics of water and aqueous solutions.
Paul Lyon Houston is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Cornell University and Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
William A. Klemperer (October 6, 1927 – November 5, 2017) was an American chemist who was one of the most influential chemical physicists and molecular spectroscopists in the second half of the 20th century. Klemperer is most widely known for introducing molecular beam methods into chemical physics research, greatly increasing the understanding of nonbonding interactions between atoms and molecules through development of the microwave spectroscopy of van der Waals molecules formed in supersonic expansions, pioneering astrochemistry, including developing the first gas phase chemical models of cold molecular clouds that predicted an abundance of the molecular HCO+ ion that was later confirmed by radio astronomy.
Yuen-Ron Shen is a Chinese physicist. He is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work on non-linear optics. He was born in Shanghai and graduated from National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard under physicist and Nobel Laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen in 1963, and joined the department of physics at Berkeley in 1964. In the early years, Shen was probably best known for his work on self-focusing and filament propagation of laser beams in materials. These fundamental studies enabled the creation of ultrafast supercontinuum light sources. In the 1970s and 1980s, he collaborated with Yuan T. Lee on the study of multiphoton dissociation of molecular clusters. The molecular-beam photofragmentation translational spectroscopy that they developed has clarified much of the initial confusion concerning the dynamics of infrared multiphoton dissociation processes. In the 1980s and 1990s, Shen developed various nonlinear optics methods for the study of material surfaces and interfaces. Among these techniques, second-harmonic generation and sum frequency generation spectroscopy are best known and now widely used by scientists from various fields. He has collaborated with Gabor Somorjai on the use of the technique of Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy to study catalyst surfaces. He is the author of the book The Principles of Nonlinear Optics. Shen belongs to the prolific J. J. Thomson academic lineage tree. Currently, Shen works in U. C. Berkeley and Fudan University in Shanghai.
Brooks H. Pate is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at the University of Virginia.
Martin Gruebele is a German-born American physical chemist and biophysicist who is currently James R. Eiszner Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics, Professor of Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is the principal investigator of the Gruebele Group.
Marsha Isack Lester is an American physical chemist. She is currently the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Lester uses both theoretical and experimental methods to study the physical chemistry of volatile organic compounds present in the earth's atmosphere. Her current work focuses on the hydroxyl radical and Criegee intermediates.
Hai-Lung Dai is a Taiwanese-born American physical chemist and university administrator. He currently is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Chemistry and Vice President for International Affairs at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States.
Martin Quack is a German physical chemist and spectroscopist; he is a professor at ETH Zürich.
Carol Klein Hall is an American chemical engineer, the Camille Dreyfus Distinguished University Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. Her research involves biomolecule simulation, self-assembly of soft materials, and the design of synthetic peptides.
James L. Skinner is an American theoretical chemist. He is the Joseph O. and Elizabeth S. Hirschfelder Professor Emeritus at the University Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Welch Foundation. Most recently, Skinner was the Crown Family Professor of Molecular Engineering, Professor of Chemistry, Director of the Water Research Initiative and Deputy Dean for Faculty Affairs of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Skinner is recognized for his contributions to the fields of theoretical chemistry, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, linear and nonlinear spectroscopy of liquids, amorphous and crystalline solids, surfaces, proteins, and supercritical fluids. Skinner is the co-author of over 230 peer-reviewed research articles.