Physical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Veronica Vaida, University of Colorado Boulder
Credit: Official NAS website
"Chemistry in multiple phases and at interfaces in the contemporary and ancient Earth’s atmosphere"
Host: Fang Liu
About the Seminar
Inspired by atmospheric measurements, which have established that atmospheric chemistry occurs in many phases and at interfaces, my group explored the unique reaction environments presented by planetary atmospheres. In this presentation, the special morphological and chemical properties of organic films on aqueous solutions will be discussed with reference to atmospheric aerosols, sea surface microlayers, cloud and fog droplets. The surface of water in aqueous drops and at the sea surface provides a special and unique reaction environment with qualitatively different thermodynamic and kinetic properties from bulk aqueous solutions. Examples from our lab will be presented of chemistry initiated at the water surface leading to increase in the chemical complexity of the system. Solar radiation is the largest source of energy on both the contemporary and early Earth. Multiphase photochemical mechanisms will be discussed by which a-keto acids react in aqueous environments to form organic radicals, which then recombine to form larger, more complex lipids. The relevance of this chemistry to reactions in the contemporary atmosphere as well as chemistry that may have occurred prebiotically, in the absence of enzymes on ancient Earth, will be discussed.
About the Speaker
Veronica Vaida started university in Bucharest, Romania and received her B.Sc. degree (1973) in chemistry at Brown University. She completed her Ph.D. (1977) degree at Yale, then went to Harvard University, as a Xerox post-doctoral fellow, then as an assistant and associate professor in chemistry. In 1984 Prof. Vaida moved to the University of Colorado, Boulder where she is currently a Professor of Chemistry and a fellow of CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences). Her teaching and research have followed an interdisciplinary path at the interface of physical chemistry and atmospheric science. At the University of Colorado she focused on light-initiated reactions interest in planetary atmospheres including the contemporary and prebiotic Earth. Veronica Vaida has been a fellow of the Sloan Foundation (1980), the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar (1984), Erskine (University of Canterbury, New Zealand 1994), Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2004-2006), was elected fellow of AAAS and APS. She received the ACS Wilson award in spectroscopy in 2011 and the ACS Langmuir Award in chemical physics in 2020. Veronica was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.