14th Annual Stauffer Lectureship (Day 2 of 2): Professor Mark Ratner, Northwestern University
About the Seminar:
"Nano and Energy: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship"
Huge problems of energy and sustainability confront the science/engineering community and mankind and our planet. This overview will stress the nature of the problems, and a few areas where theoretical chemistry can make substantial contributions to solving these problems. The energy problem comes in many dimensions, including supply, demand, conservation, transportation, and storage. Some remarks will be made on solar cells and on advanced batteries.
About the Speaker:
Mark Ratner was in junior high school when Sputnik was launched, and that occasioned his becoming a scientist. He finished high school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, college at Harvard, and doctoral work at Northwestern (in 1969). Following postdoctoral work at Aarhus in Denmark (where he worked on the kind of very formal theory that attracts young scientists), and in Munich, he began his career in the Chemistry Department at New York University. His first student there, Ari Aviram, was really the person who launched modern investigations into the area of molecular electronics. Ratner returned to Northwestern as Professor of Chemistry in 1975. He has chaired the Chemistry Department at Northwestern, served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and now holds the Dumas University Professorship in the Department of Chemistry. Ratner is interested in structure at the nanoscale, function at the nanoscale, and the theory of fundamental chemical processes. More specifically, he tries to bring together structure and function in molecular nanostructures, based on theoretical notions, on exemplary calculations, and (very importantly) on collaborations with experimentalists and other theorists, in the United States and around the world. Some principal areas of interest are molecular electronics, theories of self‐assembly, nonlinear response in molecules, and exact and approximate theories of quantum dynamics. His newest interest is in using nanoscience to attack the energy problems facing this world. In the interstices of these, he spends as much time trout fishing as he possibly can. Ratner is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. He has received the Langmuir Award from the American Chemical Society, the Feynman Award from the Foresight Institute and an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. . He also has also been a member of the Faculty Teaching Honor Roll at Northwestern eleven times, and has taught roughly five thousand students in General Chemistry in the last dozen years. He is the coauthor of two textbooks on quantum mechanics in chemistry, and of non‐technical books on nanotechnology.