Dudley R. Herschbach

Frank B. Baird, Jr. Research Professor of Science, Harvard University

Dudley Herschbach was born in San Jose, California (1932) and received his B.S. degree in Mathematics (1954) and M.S. in Chemistry (1955) at Stanford University, followed by an A.M. degree in Physics (1956) and Ph.D. in Chemical Physics (1958) at Harvard. After a term as Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard (1957-1959), he was a member of the Chemistry Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley (1959-1963), before returning to Harvard as Professor of Chemistry (1963), where he was Baird Professor of Science (1976-2003) and is now a Research Professor (Emeritus). He has served as Chairman of the Chemical Physics program (1964-1977) and the Chemistry Department (1977-1980), as a member of the Faculty Council (1980-1983), and Co-Master with his wife Georgene of Currier House (1981-1986). His teaching roster includes graduate courses in quantum mechanics, chemical kinetics, molecular spectroscopy, and collision theory, as well as undergraduate courses in physical chemistry and general chemistry for freshmen, his most challenging assignment. Currently he gives a freshman seminar course on Molecular Motors and an informal graduate “minicourse” on topics in chemical physics. He is engaged in several efforts to improve K-16 science education and public understanding of science. He serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees of Science Service, which publishes Science News and conducts the Intel ScienceTalent Search and the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Association for Women in Science, and the Royal Chemical Society of Great Britain. His awards include the Pure Chemistry Prize of the American Chemical Society (1965), the Linus Pauling Medal (1978), the Michael Polanyi Medal (1981), the Irving Langmuir Prize of the American Physical Society (1983), the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1986), jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi, the National Medal of Science (1991), the Jaroslav Heyrovsky Medal (1992), the Sierra Nevada Distinguished Chemist Award (1993), the Kosolapoff Award of the ACS (1994), and the William Walker Prize (1994). He was named by Chemical & Engineering News among the 75 leading contributors to the chemical enterprise in the past 75 years (1998).

Herschbach's current research is devoted to methods of orienting molecules for studies of collision stereodynamics, means of slowing and trapping molecules in order to examine chemistry at long deBroglie wavelengths, a dimensional scaling approach to strongly correlated many-particle interactions, and theoretical analysis of molecular motors, particularly enzyme-DNA systems.