SOMORJAI NAMED 2000 PAULING AWARD MEDALIST

Somorjai, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, will receive the award following a symposium entitled "Surface Science and Catalysis at the Frontiers of Chemistry" to be held October 21 at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. Other speakers at the symposium will be Steven L. Bernasek, professor of chemistry at Princeton University, Hans-Joachim Freund, Director of the Department of Chemical Physics at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, and D. Wayne Goodman, Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. Bernasek received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1975 under Somorjai's supervision.

Somorjai is known for his pioneering work in developing the molecular foundations of surface science, with particular emphasis on heterogeneous catalysis. In the mid-1960s, Somorjai used low energy electron diffraction (LEED) to make the important discovery that the clean Pt(100) surface reconstructs. In surface reconstruction, atoms at a surface assume positions different than one would expect if the bulk structure of the material was abruptly terminated. Somorjai's proposal of clean surface reconstruction for the Pt(100) single crystal surface was controversial at the time, but many other surfaces have been observed to exhibit reconstruction since and this phenomenon is no longer considered surprising. Subsequently, Somorjai used a variety of surface structural techniques to probe increasingly complex surfaces. Research in his laboratory included the first studies of adsorption on stepped surfaces, the first investigation of surface melting and freezing using LEED, the first surface structural studies of molecular crystals, and the first structural characterization of an adsorbed organic molecule using LEED.

In addition to his groundbreaking studies of surface structure, Somorjai developed the field in which model systems are used to probe heterogeneous catalytic reactions. Employing molecular beam scattering methods, he directly showed that steps on platinum surfaces are essential for dissociation of hydrogen, a key process in many surface catalyzed reactions. Somorjai also pioneered the use of single crystal metal surfaces as model catalysts to investigate the kinetics and mechanisms of heterogeneously catalyzed reactions. His development of a high pressure catalytic reactor which could be isolated from an ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) allowed the use of electron spectroscopic techniques for characterizing single crystal catalyst surfaces immediately prior to and after high pressure experiments. This approach enables the correlation of the high pressure kinetics of a catalytic reaction with the structural and compositional characterization of the single crystal catalyst. Somorjai's pioneering work in this area provided much of the first atomic level information about the connection between surface structure and surface kinetics.

Somorjai was born in Budapest, Hungary where he studied chemical engineering at the Technical University, Budapest. He fled Hungary in 1956 with his future wife, Judy Kaldor, and emigrated to the United States in 1957. Somorjai received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California Berkeley in 1959 and subsequently took a position with the solid state materials group at IBM Research. While at IBM, Somorjai persuaded the management to purchase the first commercially available LEED apparatus so that he could undertake basic surface science studies on materials of interest to IBM. In 1964, Somorjai accepted a faculty position in chemistry at Berkeley where has been ever since. He has also been a principal investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory since that time. Somorjai has published over 750 articles and has authored three textbooks, starting with the Principles of Surface Chemistry published in 1972, Chemistry in Two Dimensions: Surfaces in 1981, and Introduction to Surface Science and Catalysis, which was published in 1994. He serves on the editorial boards of fourteen journals and is Co-Editor in Chief of Catalysis Letters. Somorjai has received honorary degrees from five universities and his extensive list of awards includes the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society, as well as the Adamson, Debeye, Colloid and Surface Chemistry Awards, and the Award for Creative Research in Catalysis, all from the American Chemical Society. Somorjai is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The Pauling Symposium will begin at 1:30 pm on Saturday, October 21 and will be followed by a reception that is open to the public. A no-host dinner and the Pauling Medal presentation begin will begin at 7:00 pm, with all activities held on the Western Washington University campus. This year's award chair is WWU professor Mark E. Bussell and the symposium chair is WWU Professor James R. Vyvyan. For more information, call 360-650-2883 or visit the 2000 Pauling Award website at the WWU Chemistry Department webpage: http://www.chem.wwu.edu.