Zare Talks " Fizzics" At Williams12:00AM / Wednesday, February 28, 2007
 | | Stanford University Professor Richard Zare |
Williamstown - Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and chair of the chemistry department at Stanford University, will deliver a lecture on "Chemical Fizzics: All about Bubbles," on Tues., March 6, at 4 p.m.. The event is scheduled at The Science Center's Wege Auditorium on the Williams College campus.
The event is free and the public is invited.
Zare is the author of "Fizzical Attraction" in Nature Magazine, "Bursting Bubbles," in The Nucleus, and "Strange Fizzical Attraction" in the Journal of Chemistry Education, among more than 700 articles that he has written or co-written.
He is renowned for his pioneering in the area of laser chemistry, research that has resulted in a greater understanding of chemical reactions at the molecular level, as well as problem solving in the field of chemical analysis. Zare's development of laser induced fluorescence to study reaction dynamics has been widely adopted by many laboratories. In his own laboratory, he works with students to use laser beams to study everything from the extraterrestrial organic molecules in meteorites from Mars to bubble movement in glasses of beer.
He has been awarded numerous science and teaching awards over the years, including the prestigious Wolf Prize in Chemistry and the National Medal of Science. In 2006, Zare was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) professor to develop new interdisciplinary undergraduate science laboratory courses at Stanford.
For his HHMI project, Zare has developed a laboratory course in the life sciences that examines organisms' relationships with light. Zare aims to motivate students to pursue a career in research by encouraging them to pursue their own questions in the hands-on environment of the laboratory.
Most recently, in 2007, Zare was elected to a four-year term as advisor to the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. He served as the chair of the President's National Medal of Science Selection Committee 1997-2000, chaired the National Research Council's Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, 1992-1995, and served as chair of the National Science Board the last two years of his 1992-1998 service. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Society. He has served six years on the policy-setting board of the National Science Foundation.
He also has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Colorado, and Columbia University.
Zare received his B.A. in chemistry and physics and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University. |
