Gábor A. Somorjai

Gabor Arpad Somorjai ( born May 4, 1935 in Budapest, Hungary) is professor at the University of California and a leading researcher in the field of surface chemistry.

Life and work

Somorjai was born in 1935 in Budapest, the son of Jewish parents. With the help of Raoul Wallenberg, the family exhibited Swedish passports, the family of the briefing escaped a concentration camp.

After the war Somorjai studied from 1956 chemical engineering at the University of Budapest. As a participant of the Hungarian uprising, he left Hungary after the invasion of Soviet troops and emigrated to the United States. He enrolled at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in 1960. After having been employed at IBM, he returned in 1964 as an assistant professor at the University back.

Research

The application and development of analytical techniques such as LEED revolutionized in the 1950s and 1960s, the study of surfaces. Somorjai applied the methods on platinum catalysts in which he recognized that lattice defects correlate with the catalytic activity. His research also had a great influence on the development of nanotechnology. Already in the 1980s, Somorjai employed at the sum frequency spectroscopy ( SFS), which permits the study of surface reactions without vacuum chamber. For his research, he was recognized in 1998 with Gerhard Ertl with the Wolf Prize.

Somorjai was hired as a consultant for the 2002 Winter Olympics, where the development drove forward faster skating surfaces. He had noticed that the skaters glide on vibrating molecules that act as lubricants and not originally adopted as a water trail.

Somorjai has published over 1000 articles in academic journals and three books were out in the field of surface chemistry. He is one of the most cited researchers in the field of surface chemistry and catalysis.

Prizes and awards

Somorjai received numerous prizes and awards. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1979 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983. He won the 1997 Von Hippel Award, and the 1998 Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry together with Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin.

Furthermore, the National Medal of Science awarded him for his contributions to the development of modern surface science and the justification of the molecular basis of many technologies for the study of surfaces. The American Chemical Society awarded him the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry and the Adamson Award in Surface Chemistry.

In 2008 he received the Priestley Medal as the highest prize of the American Chemical Society, for his " exceptionally creative and original contributions to Surface Chemistry and Catalysis ". In 2013 he was awarded the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences.

The American Chemical Society has awarded since 2002, Gabor A. Somorjai Award for Creative Research in Catalysis.

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