Zare, Miller Win Inaugural Herschbach Award

Richard N. Zare, Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science at Stanford University, and William H. Miller, Kenneth S. Pitzer Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, are the recipients of the inaugural Dudley R. Herschbach Award for excellence in the field of chemical reaction dynamics.

The award, given to one theoretician and one experimentalist, is named in honor of Nobel Laureate and Harvard professor Dudley Herschbach for his more than 40 years of work in chemical dynamics.

Zare is a pioneer in the field of laser chemistry. He has applied high-resolution and ultrasensitive physical techniques to both chemical and biochemical analysis, and his work has generated new spectroscopic tools for investigating chemical dynamics and studying biochemical processes.

Among Zare's many other contributions are the angular analysis of photodissociation fragments, laser-induced fluorescence and chemiluminescence to probe internal state distributions, multiphoton ionization in molecular beams, and two-step laser mass spectrometry.

Miller's research focuses on molecular collision theory and chemical reaction dynamics. Most recently, he has been developing the initial value representation of semiclassical theory into a practical way of adding quantum effects to classical molecular dynamics simulations of chemical processes.

Miller is also studying other dynamic phenomena such as photodissociation and femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy.

Zare and Miller will receive their awards during the 21st Dynamics of Molecular Collisions meeting in Santa Fe, N.M on July 8–13.