Frank Stillinger

Frank Henry Stillinger ( born August 15, 1934 in Boston) is an American chemist who deals with physical chemistry.

Stillinger studied at the University of Rochester with a bachelor 's degree in 1955 (with Frank P. Buff ) and in 1958 received his doctorate from Yale University with John G. Kirkwood ( he also listened to Lars Onsager ). He was from 1959 to 2001 at Bell Laboratories. After visiting scientist at Princeton University, he was in 1996, where he has been since 2003 a senior scientist.

It dealt from the 1960s to the structure of liquids, especially water and aqueous solutions, with molecular dynamics simulations, starting 1967/68 with the construction of an effective potential between water molecules with Arieh Ben Naim. He worked with Aneesur Rahman and later with Thomas A. Weber, he developed with which the Stillinger -Weber potential for silicon ( 1985).

It also deals with phase transitions, structure and kinetics of metastable materials such as glass, spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry in molecules with application to the chemical processes at the origin of life, fundamental questions of quantum chemistry, geometric aspects of packing problems.

Honors and Memberships

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society.