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Tuesday, May 4, 2004
WRITER: Phil Williams, 706542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
CONTACT: Henry F. Schaefer, 706542-0364, hfs@uga.eduUGA PROFESSOR HENRY F. SCHAEFER III NAMED FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
ATHENS, Ga. – Henry F. Schaefer III, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, has been named a Fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The result of the latest election of fellows was made public late Monday.
The election took place on Friday, April 30, during which 178 Fellows from 24 states and 24 Foreign Honorary Members from 13 countries were elected. This is the second consecutive year a faculty member from UGA has been selected for the honor.
“Fritz Schaefer is a world-renowned scientist whose research has not only opened important new frontiers in computational chemistry, but also brought international recognition to the University of Georgia,” said UGA President Michael F. Adams. “He is fully deserving of this signal honor, and the entire university community is exceedingly proud and delighted.”
“I have worked very closely with Dr. Schaefer and am extremely pleased that he has been recognized in this significant way for his scientific contributions and leadership,” added Arnett C. Mace Jr., senior vice president for academic affairs and provost.
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Dean Wyatt Anderson was equally enthusiastic. “I am personally delighted that Fritz Schaefer was elected to the American Academy,” said Anderson. “His work is fully deserving of this important honor.”
Schaefer is also the director of UGA’s Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry. He joins geneticists John Avise, Norman Giles and Wyatt Anderson, anthropologist Brent Berlin and plant biologist Steven Hubbell (elected last year) as the only members from UGA.
The academy was founded during the American Revolution by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other leaders who contributed prominently to the establishment of the new nation, its government and its Constitution. Its purpose was to provide a forum for a select group of scholars, members of the learned professions and government and business leaders to work together on behalf of the democratic interests of the republic.
Today the academy is an international learned society with a dual function: to elect to membership men and women of exceptional achievement, drawn from science, scholarship, business, public affairs and the arts, and to conduct a varied program of projects and studies responsive to the needs and problems of society.
The academy today has 4,000 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members. The academy is probably best known to the public through its quarterly journal, Daedalus, widely regarded as one of the world's leading intellectual journals.
“This came as a complete surprise to me,” said Schaefer.
Henry F. Schaefer III was born in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1944. He received his B.S. degree in chemical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1966) and Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from Stanford University (1969).
For 18 years (1969-1987) he served as a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1979-1980 academic year, he was also Wilfred T. Doherty Professor of Chemistry and inaugural director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin.
Since 1987 Schaefer has been at UGA. His other academic appointments include Professeur d’Echange at the University of Paris (1977); Gastprofessur at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochshule (ETH), Zurich (1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004); and David P. Craig Visiting Professor at the Australian National University (1999). He is the author of more than 1,000 scientific publications, the majority appearing in the Journal of Chemical Physics or the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Schaefer has presented plenary lectures at more than 180 national or international scientific conferences. He has delivered endowed or named lectures or lecture series at more than 30 major universities, including the 1998 Kenneth S. Pitzer Memorial Lecture at Berkeley. He is the recipient of eleven honorary degrees.
He is the editor-in-chief of the London-based journal Molecular Physics and president of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists. His service to the chemical community includes the chairmanship of the American Chemical Society’s Subdivision of Theoretical Chemistry (1982) and Division of Physical Chemistry (1992).
His major awards include the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry (1979, “for the development of computational quantum chemistry into a reliable quantitative field of chemistry and for prolific exemplary calculations of broad chemical interest”); the American Chemical Society Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award (1983, “for his contributions to computational quantum chemistry and for outstanding applications of this technique to a wide range of chemical problems”); the Schroedinger Medal (1990); and the Centenary Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (London, 1992, as “the first theoretical chemist successfully to challenge the accepted conclusions of a distinguished experimental group for a polyatomic molecule, namely methylene”). In 2003 he received two major awards from the American Chemical Society: the Theoretical Chemistry Award and the Ira M. Remsen Award.
During the comprehensive period of 1981-1997, Schaefer was the sixth most highly cited chemist in the world, out of a total of 628,000 chemists whose research was cited. His research involves the use of state-of-the-art computational hardware and theoretical methods to solve important problems in molecular quantum mechanics.
NOTE TO EDITORS: A photo of Henry F. Schaefer III is available at www.photo.alumni.uga.edu.
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