Richard Zare

Richard N. Zare ( born November 19, 1939 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American professor of chemistry at Stanford University.

Life

His B. A. in chemistry and physics, he earned in 1961 at Harvard University, where he became in 1964 a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. In 1965 he became Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was from 1966 at the University of Colorado. In 1969 he became professor of chemistry at Columbia University, from 1975 as Higgins Professor of Natural Science. From 1977 he was a professor at Stanford University, where he joined the chemistry faculty board in 2005. In 2006 he was there, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor ( HHMI ) and Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor.

He is known for his research in laser chemistry, which led to a better understanding of chemical reactions at the molecular level.

Zare is a member of the Royal Society of London, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has won, among others, the Fresenius Award ( 1974), the Michael Polanyi Medal ( 1979 ), the National Medal of Science (1983 ), the Welch Award in Chemistry ( 1999), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry ( 2005), the Priestley Medal (2010 ) and the King Faisal Prize ( 2011).

He is author and co- author of over 800 publications, holds 50 patents and has ten honorary doctorates (2010).

Publications (selection)

• Angular momentum - understanding spatial aspects in chemistry and physics, Wiley 1988
• Laser experiments for beginners, Sausolito, University Science Books 1995
• Hadamard Transform Time-of -Flight Mass Spectrometry: More Signal, More of the Time, FM Fernández, JR Kimmel, and RN Zare, Angewandte Chemie, 42, 30-35 ( 2003).
• Chemical cytometry on a picoliter - scale integrated microfluidic chip, H. Wu, AR Wheeler and RN Zare, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (USA) 101, 12809-12813 ( 2004).
• Laser Control of Chemical Reactions, RN Zare, Science, 279, 1875-1879 (1998).
• Anatomy of Elementary Chemical Reactions, AJ Alexander and RN Zare, J. Chem Ed. , 75, 1105-1118 (1998).
• Observation and Interpretation of a Time - Delayed Mechanism in the Hydrogen Exchange Reaction, SC Althorpe, F. Fernández- Alonso, BD Bean, JD Ayers, AE Pomerantz, RN Zare, and E. Wrede, Nature 416, 67-70 (2002).