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George C. Schatz

Schatz

Born April 14, 1949 in Watertown, New York.

Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA.

Email:g-schatz@northwestern.edu
WWW: external link

Schatz is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry 2005-2019. Awards include Sloan and Dreyfus Fellowships, the Fresenius Award of Phi Lambda Upsilon, the Max Planck Research Award, the Ver Steeg Fellowship of Northwestern University, the Feynman Prize of the Foresight Institute, the Herschbach Medal, the Debye and Langmuir Awards of the ACS, the Bourke Medal and S F Boys-A Rahman Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Hirschfelder Award of the University of Wisconsin, the Mulliken Medal of the University of Chicago, and the Zewail Prize of Elsevier Publishers. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society and of the AAAS. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society and of the Chemical Research Society of India.

Author of:

Over 1000 publications, including the textbooks Quantum Mechanics in Chemistry, (with M. A. Ratner), Prentice Hall (1993) and Introduction to Quantum Mechanics in Chemistry, (with M. A. Ratner), Prentice Hall (2001).

Important Contributions:

  • Schatz's best known work is concerned with quantum theories of reactive collisions between molecules. His study of H + H2 was a landmark calculation that continues to be important many years later. Schatz was also a major contributor to the discovery of transition state resonances in reactive collisions, and the characterization of tunneling and adiabatic effects in chemical reactions.
  • A field that Schatz initiated is the study of state-to-state chemical reactions involving polyatomic molecules using quasiclassical methods. His prediction of mode-selective reaction dynamics in the H + H2O reaction stimulated the first experimental demonstration of this effect.
  • Schatz developed one of the first electromagnetic theories of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS), and he did the first theoretical studies of Surface Enhanced HyperRaman Scattering. He used theory to discover plasmonic lattice polaritons in nanoparticle arrays, and this work on Surface Lattices Resonances subsequently led to the development of plasmonic lasers. Also simulations by Schatz have led to new discoveries concerning the properties of DNA, of DNA-nanoparticle superlattices, of carbon nanotube emitters, of fibers based on peptide amphiphiles, and of entangled photons.