Yuan T. Lee

Yuan Tseh Lee (Chinese李远哲, Pinyin lǐ Yuǎn Zhe; born November 19, 1936 in Hsinchu, Taiwan) is a Taiwanese chemist.

In 1986 he was awarded, together with Dudley R. Herschbach and John C. Polanyi "for their contributions to the dynamics of elementary chemical processes " with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Lee studied from 1955 at the National Taiwan University (Bachelor 1959) and at Tsinghua University, where he received his master's degree in chemistry. From 1962 he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in 1965 at Bruce Mahan. From 1967 he was in the group of Herschbach at Harvard University, where he improved the molecular beam experiments ( crossed beam experiments ) to study chemical reactions, which afterwards was his main field of research. From 1968 he was Assistant Professor at the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago, from 1971 as an associate professor and from 1973 as a professor. In 1974 he went back to Berkeley, where he was a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has been a visiting professor at Caltech ( Fairchild Scholar 1983).

In 1981 he received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the 1986 Peter Debye Award of the American Chemical Society and the 1986 National Medal of Science.

Lee had until October 19, 2006, President of the Academia Sinica ( to which he belongs since 1980), for which he had to give up in 1974 acquired U.S. citizenship. He was succeeded by Chi -Huey Wong. Lee is President of the International Scientific Council. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ( 1975) and the National Academy of Sciences ( 1979). In 1980 he received an honorary professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and he is an Honorary Professor of several Chinese universities (such as the Fudan University in Shanghai). 1969/71 he was a Sloan Fellow and 1976/77 Guggenheim Fellow. In 1986 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo.

He is married and has two sons and a daughter.