Mario J. Molina

Mario José Molina ( born March 19, 1943 in Mexico City) is a Mexican chemist. He received 1995 together with the chemist Frank Sherwood Rowland and the meteorologist Paul J. Crutzen the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research into the destruction of the ozone layer.

Molina and Rowland discovered that some industrial gases destroy the ozone layer. As a region of stratospheric ozone depletion, the "ozone hole" over Antarctica was discovered in the 1980s, her research has been debated worldwide and emissions of chlorofluorocarbons substances ultimately severely restricted in the late 20th century.

Career

Molina studied industrial chemistry at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City and at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau (Diploma 1967). He continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972 in physical chemistry.

He then worked as a post-doc at F. Sherwood Rowland at the University of California, Irvine and was the main author of the essay on the destruction of the ozone layer, published in the journal Nature, the two in 1974.

Between 1974 and 2004, Molina various teaching and research appointments at the University of California, Irvine, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( Jet Propulsion Laboratory ) of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (California ) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (Massachusetts ) holds. Since July 2004 he has been in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, and worked at the Center for the study of the atmosphere of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

With Paul Crutzen together, he was already the 1994 Max Planck Research Award.

In 2013 he received the Medal of Freedom.

Publications

• 2002: Luisa T. Molina: airquality in the Mexico Megacity: An Integrated Assessment. Kluwert Academic Publications, Dordrecht / Boston, ISBN 1-4020-0452-4.