In Memoriam - Peter Curtin '08
 A memorial service for Peter Curtin, a 2008 Princeton graduate who died Oct. 10 while running the Baltimore Marathon, is planned for 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 25, in the Princeton University Chapel. A reception will follow in the Campus Club, 5 Prospect Avenue from 2:30 - 4:30 P.M.
Curtin earned an A.B. in chemistry with highest honors. He received multiple awards, including the Robert T. McCay Prize, the Malcolm H. Chisholm Inorganic Chemistry Prize and the GPEC Solar Energy Innovation Award and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. While at Princeton, he co-wrote a paper published in Chemistry -- A European Journal, and he is lead author of a paper based on his senior thesis that is scheduled for publication in Inorganic Chemistry.
He was a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. His research focused on the use of chemical sensors to assess how well chemotherapy drugs treat tumors.
Curtin is survived by his parents Michael, a member of Princeton's class of 1973, and Anne of Wilmington, N.C.; his brother Matthew; and his sister Alison.
His family has established the Peter N. Curtin, Class of 2008, Memorial Fund to support undergraduates in Princeton's Department of Chemistry. Donations in his memory may be made out to "Princeton University" with the note "Peter N. Curtin, Class of 2008, Memorial Fund" and mailed to Helen Hardy, Princeton University, Alumni and Donor Records, P.O. Box 5357, Princeton, NJ 08543.
Groves Recieves Award
Jay Groves has been selected to receive the 2010 Hans Fischer Career Award in Porphyrin Chemistry by the Society of Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines. The award is sponsored by the Hans Fischer Gesellschaft in Munich, named for Hans Fischer, a German organic chemist and 1930 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The award is given every two years to a senior scientist for his lifetime work in the field of porphyrin-related bioinorganic chemistry.
It will be presented at the International Conference on Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines in July 2010 in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico.
Mike Souza Honored
Congratulations to Mike Souza who recently was awarded the literary prize by the British Society of Scientific Glassblowers. The award was chosen by the Society's editorial board for literary contributions to their quarterly journal in 2008-09 for his paper entitled "Atypical Glass Instruments Used in Atomic, Nuclear and Astrophysics Experiments." The award was presented to Mike on September 11 in Glasgow, Scotland. Concluding the lecture program for the first day of the symposium, Mike delivered a lecture regarding non-typical glasses in nuclear, atomic and astrophysics. He received an additional award for his lecture which was named the Norman Collins Memorial Lecture.
Roberto Car Receives Sidney Fernbach Award
Roberto Car has recently been named the co-recipient along with Michele Parrinello of the IEEE Computer Society 2009 Sidney Fernbach Award. The Fernbach Award is one of the IEEE Computer Society's highest awards, recognizing outstanding contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. The citation from the IEEE Computer Society reads: "For leadership in creating the modern theoretical and practical foundations for modeling the chemistry and physics of materials. The software resulting from this work is one of the enabling tools for materials science modeling." The award will be presented at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Oregon in November 2009.
Car wins Dirac Medal
by Kitta MacPherson
 Roberto Car, the Ralph W. Dornte *31 Professor in Chemistry at Princeton and a faculty fellow of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, has been named a winner of the 2009 Dirac Medal for his significant contributions to physics.
Car was recognized for his groundbreaking work that builds on the fundamental laws governing the interactions of electrons and nuclei and helps predict the behavior of complex molecules and materials.
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, will award the Dirac Medal to Car and Michele Parrinello, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at Universita della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, for co-developing the theory of "ab-initio molecular dynamics." The theory, written by the scientists in 1985, is widely used in theoretical computations of numerous problems in physics and chemistry.
Their approach, which has become known as the Car-Parrinello Method, combines quantitative electronic energy calculations, via a theory known as Density Functional Theory, with Newtonian molecular dynamics simulations. The method has provided an important quantitative understanding of the properties of matter, while also allowing scientists and nonscientists alike to visualize atoms in motion during physical and chemical processes.
"With this year's Dirac Medal, ICTP acknowledges the enormous impact the Car-Parrinello Method has made on the creation of molecular simulations," said ICTP Director K.R. Sreenivasan. "This is the first time that the Dirac Medal recognizes computational physics properly, the Car-Parrinello Method being a major milestone in that area."
The award is given in honor of the English physicist Paul Dirac and is announced annually on his birthday, Aug. 8. The medalists also receive a prize of $5,000.
An award ceremony will be held in early 2010.
Dorothea Fiedler to Join Chemistry Faculty in July 2010
 We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Dorothea Fiedler will join the faculty as an assistant professor in July 2010. Fiedler is a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Kevan Shokat at the University of California at San Francisco. Her research is in chemical biology and bioinorganic chemistry with emphasis on signaling functions of small molecule second messengers. Dr. Fiedler earned a Diplom in Chemistry from Bayerische Julius-Maximilians Universitat in Wurzburg, Germany and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.
Emily Carter Elected to International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science
Emily Carter, Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Mechanical and Areospace Engineering and Applied and Computational Mathematics and Associated Faculty Member in Chemistry, has been elected a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. Members are chosen among scientists of all countries who have distinguished themselves by the value of their scientific work, their role of pioneer or leaders of a school in the broad field of quantum molecular science.
The academy was created in Menton, France in 1967, with Professors Raymond Daudel (France), Per-Olov Lowdin (Sweden), Robert G. Parr (USA), John A.
Pople (USA), and Bernard Pullman (France) as its founding members, under the inspiration and with the support of Professor Louis de Broglie, Nobel Laureate and Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, Paris, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.
Chemistry Faculty Honored
The Chemistry Department is pleased to congratulate our colleagues who were recently honored:
Jay Groves and Roberto Car were both named Fellows of The Royal Society of Chemistry in the U.K., the learned society with the goal of advancing the chemical sciences.
The designation FRSC is given to a group of elected Fellows who have made outstanding contributions to chemistry.
Sal Torquato has been selected as a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). One of the initial group of fellows, he was chosen for outstanding contributions to these fields.
Haw Yang Joins Chemistry Faculty
 The Princeton University Department of Chemistry
is delighted to announce that Professor Haw Yang has joined our faculty as an associate professor effective July 2009.
Professor Yang’s research is in the areas of physical chemistry, materials chemistry, and the biophysics of single biological macromolecules. Prior to his appointment at Princeton Prof. Yang was an assistant professor at Berkeley, where he also received his graduate degree with Prof. Charles Harris. Previous appointments also include a postdoctoral research position with Prof. Sunny Xie at Harvard. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and has received the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the Hellman Family Faculty Award, and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.
To learn more about Prof. Yang and his research, you can check his website at http://www.princeton.edu/~yanglab/Yang_Lab.html.
News Archives
Past news items
Industrial Associates Program Newsletter
Fall 2008
Alumni News
Spring 2009 |
|
|
