ACS Award in Nuclear Chemistry
| 2008 Romulado de Souza | 2007 Norbert G. Trautmann | 2006 Steven W. Yates |
| 2005 Luciano G. Moretto | 2004 Donald G. Fleming | 2003 Demetrios G. Sarantites |
| 2002 Joanna S. Fowler | 2001 William B. Walters | 2000 Richard L. "Dick" Hahn |
| 1999 Karl-Ludwig Kratz | 1998 Raymond K. Sheline | 1997 Peter Armbruster |
| 1996 William D. Ehmann | 1995 Joseph B. Natowitz | 1994 E. Kenneth Hulet |
| 1993 Richard M. Diamond | 1992 Robert N. Clayton | 1991 John M. Alexander |
| 1990 Michael J. Welch | 1989 Ronald D. Macfarlane | 1988 Guenter Herrman |
| 1987 Ellis P. Steinberg | 1986 Victor E. Viola | 1985 Gregory R. Choppin |
| 1984 Joseph Cerny | 1983 Darleane C. Hoffman | 1982 Leo Yaffe |
| 1981 Robert Vandenbosch | 1980 Arthur M. Poskanzer | 1979 Raymond G. Davis, Jr. |
| 1978 Paul K. Kuroda | 1977 Glen E. Gordon | 1976 John O. Rasmussen |
| 1975 John R. Huizenga | 1974 Lawrence E. Glendenin | 1973 Albert Ghiorso |
| 1972 Anthony Turkevich | 1971 Alfred P. Wolf | 1970 Paul R. Fields |
| 1969 George E. Boyd | 1968 Richard L. Wolfgang | 1967 Gerhart Friedlander |
| 1966 Arthur C. Wahl | 1965 Stanley G. Thompson | 1964 Isadore Perlman |
| 1963 Martin D. Kamen | 1962 Truman P. Kohman | 1961 Joseph H. Katz |
| 1960 Charles D. Coryell | 1959 John E. Willard | 1958 Jacob Bigeleisen |
| 1957 Melvin Calvin | 1956 Willard F. Libby | 1955 Henry Taube |
2008 Glenn T. Seaborg Nuclear Chemistry Award
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Romualdo de Souza |
from Chemical & Engineering News, January 21, 2008 - Volume 86, Number 3
Romualdo T. de Souza, the son of an American oil company engineer, was born in India in 1963. When he was six, his family relocated to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where they lived for four years before immigrating to the U.S. De Souza grew up in the late 1960s, and his passion for science and engineering was ignited by the Apollo space program and the race to put a man on the moon.
De Souza, professor of chemistry at Indiana University, Bloomington, is now a leading researcher in the field of nuclear reaction dynamics. The award winner has been selected for his work in elucidating the nature of nuclear multifragmentation through the use of fragment-fragment velocity correlations and developing key instrumentation enabling research in nuclear chemistry.
"Professor de Souza is a true scholar doing cutting-edge research in the field of nuclear chemistry," says David F. Clemmer, Robert & Marjorie Mann Chair of Chemistry at Indiana University. "The insight, ambition, and energy that Professor de Souza brings to his science are remarkable," Clemmer says.
Receiving this horror, however, was a bit of a surprise for de Souza. "It is gratifying to have the work that you feel so passionately about recognized by colleagues in the field," he says. He adds that winning this award is particularly meaningful as many of his scientific role models arc former Seaborg Award recipients.
De Souza's research deals with nuclear reactions involving a single collision of two nuclei. The collision yields a highly excited nuclear system that rapidly decays into multiple protons, neutrons, and larger clusters. This phenomenon is known as multifragmentation.
"This technique of fragment-fragment correlations utilizes the interaction between the particles themselves to assess the spatial and temporal extent of the decaying source on the timescale of less than 10-21 seconds," de Souza explains. With this approach, his group has been able to show that multifragmentation is an evolutionary process and does not involve an instantaneous breakup of a highly excited system into multiple fragments as previously thought.
De Souza's research also included the development of sophisticated instrumentation capable of yielding high isotope and angular resolution. Specifically, he has played a key role in developing 4 detectors and silicon strip arrays.
In addition to his research contributions, de Souza has been active in improving chemical education. For example, in 1996, he developed the Computer Assisted Learning Method (calm.indiuna.edu), which is a Web-based learning environment that is now being used by more than 2,000 first-year chemistry students at Indiana Universitys Bloomington campus.
"Professor de Souza brings to his research an energy and intellect that has enriched not only our knowledge of the interactions between complex nuclei but also the broader scientific community through his initiatives in instrumentation and chemical education," says Claus-Konrad Gelbke, director of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University.
Prior to joining Indiana University in 1991, de Souza, 44, completed a postdoc appointment at the University of Rochester and a research assistantship at NSCL. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the University of Rochester 1988 and 1985, respectively and an A.B. from Washington University, St. Louis (1983).
De Souza was an SBC Fellow in 2003 and an Ameritech Fellow in 2002. He is a member of ACS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and Sigma Xi.
The award address will be presented before the Division of Nuclear Chemistry & Technology at the fall 2008 national meeting in Philadelphia.--SUSAN MORRISSEY
2007 Glenn T. Seaborg Nuclear Chemistry Award
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Norbert G. Trautmann |
from Chemical & Engineering News, February 15, 2007 - Volume 85, Number 3
Norbert G. Trautmann, 67, had the benefit of professional contact with Glenn T. Seaborg and Otto Hahn at formative stages in his career. While working for his Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, in Germany, Trautmann was part of a group that discovered the heaviest isotopes of protactinium. Hahn, who discovered protactinium with Lise Meitner, took an interest in this work when he occasionally visited his partner in splitting the atom, Fritz Strassmann, Trautmann still at Mainz in the 1960s. "He also dropped in on my lab and asked what was going on with protactinium," Trautmann recalls.
After receiving his Ph.D., Trautmann initiated work on fast chemical separation methods, mainly based on solvent extractions. The methods had to separate a single element from a mixture 30 or more elements in fission product mixtures and perform the separation quickly enough to accommodate the sometimes subsecond half-lives of the isotopes of the isolated elements. In 1970, Seaborg became interested in the fast-separation techniques that Trautmann was developing and invited him to come to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he worked in 1970 and 1971 under Seaborg and Albert Ghiorso. Trautmann recalls Seaborg fondly. "At that time, you could ask him more or less anything about the heaviest elements," Trautmann says. "I admired him very much."
Gerhardt Friedlander, a retired senior chemist with Brookhaven National Laboratory, says Seaborg himself would be impressed by Trautmann's body of work, noting that "Trautmann coauthored several publications with him and has contributed significantly to the field closest to Seaborg's heart: production and properties of the heaviest elements."
Following his fellowship at LBNL, Trautmann returned to Mainz, where he became the deputy manager of the Research Reactor TRIGA Mainz at the Institute for Nuclear Chemistry (INC). He became the manager of the research reactor in 1991, a position he gave up only a few months ago.
Friedlander recalls, from visits to INC, Trautmann's boundless energy. "He really seems to be the one who keeps all the wheels in the institute turning," he says. "His nonstop work habits are legendary. Time and time again, I have seen experiments and projects on the verge of foundering until Trautmann came to the rescue and led them to success."
Trautmann's work at the research reactor was also seminal. Guenter F. Herrmann, his thesis adviser at Mainz, rates Trautmann's development of rapid chemical separation techniques and resonance ionization mass spectrometry (RIMS) of actinide elements as major accomplishments. "Trautmann was the first to master complicated separation schemes involving several steps on a time scale of seconds," Herrmann says. "This made numerous new nuclides in the complex fission product mixture accessible for study." Trautmann says these methods enabled measurements of the fission properties of short-lived isotopes. Using a centrifuge system developed with international partners, Trautmann then focused on chemical properties of transactinide elements with atomic numbers of 104 or greater.
RIMS was used by Trautmann and coworkers to determine the first ionization potential of the elements americium through einsteinium for the first time and for the ultratrace analysis of transuranium elements, particularly plutonium. Trautmann has authored or coauthored more than 300 papers. He won the Fritz-Strassmann Award of the German Chemical Society in 1984, the Helmholtz Award of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig in 1990, and the Otto Hahn Award of the City of Frankfurt in 1998. The award address will be presented before the Division of :Nuclear Chemistry & Technology at Fall 2007 ACS National Meeting in Boston.-ALEX TULLO
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Steven W. Yates |
from Chemical & Engineering News, February 6, 2006 - Volume 84, Number 6
| Glenn T. Seaborg Award for Nuclear Chemistry Sponsored by the ACS Division of Nuclear Chemistry & Technology Steven W. Yates, professor of chemistry, physics, and astronomy and currently chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky, has made contributions in all areas of his profession as a researcher and an educator, as an editor and a writer, and as a member of government and private-sector science panels. This award recognizes him for his groundbreaking studies of multi-phonon excitations in atomic nuclei and for the development of techniques for measuring very short nuclear lifetimes. Yates, 59, received a B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1968 and a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry from Purdue University in 1973, where he studied with Patrick Daly. Following his dissertation work at Purdue, during which he characterized a new class of negative-parity states in transitional nuclei and explained them in terms of the semidecoupled model, he accepted a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory. While there, he investigated the properties of actinide nuclei, primarily by light-ion-scattering and transfer reactions. These investigations led to meaningful predictions, based on single-particle energies, of the ultimate stability of superheavy elements. In 1975, Yates moved to the University of Kentucky, where he initiated a program of nuclear structure studies. His early work, with measurements performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, included the first observation of the backbending phenomenon in the y-vibrational band of a deformed nucleus. This discovery was key in describing backbending in terms of rotational hand interactions and band crossings. In the late 1970s, Yates began the experiments for which he is best known at the University of Kentucky's Van de Graaff accelerator. Although the inelastic neutron-scattering reaction, first characterized by Glenn T. Seaborg and his colleagues, had been used by others, Yates can be credited with recognizing and developing the spectroscopic power of this reaction and exploiting its potential. Yates's studies of multiphonon excitations in spherical and deformed nuclei are his most enduring contributions. The identification of both the K = 0 and K = 4 two-phonon g-vibrational excitations in a deformed nucleus is a remarkable achievement; however, Yates's efforts to understand the octupole excitations are even more significant. In nuclei near the 82-neutron shell closure, he found early evidence for complete multiplets of quadrupole-octupole coupled states, and his search for two-phonon octupole states led to the identification of the 0+ member of the long-sought two-phonon quartet in 208Pb. This result provided a textbook example of collective excitations in nuclei and must be regarded as confirming the existence of two-phonon octupole vibrations. His group later provided candidates for two additional members of this quartet. Because these identifications rely on knowledge of electric dipole transition rates, his group then launched a study to understand these transitions in spherical nuclei. This work led to the characterization of perhaps thefinest example of weak coupling in nuclei. Yates's most recent work has focused on determining how persistent quadrupole vibrations are in nuclei. He and his colleagues have characterized complete three-phonon multiplets in several nuclei, and, if four-phonon multiplets still retain their collective character, his group holds promise for identifying these excitations as well. His contributions in other areas are also notable. In addition to receiving both university and student initiated awards for his teaching, he has been a regular contributor of educational articles in the Journal of Chemical Education. He has been involved in ACS's Summer Schools in Nuclear Chemistry since their inception. Ten doctoral and seven master's students working under his direction have received degrees, and he has mentored more than a dozen postdocs. The award address will be presented before the Division of Nuclear Chemistry & Technology.Linda Raber |
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Luciano G. Moretto |
from Chemical & Engineering News, January 17, 2005 - Volume 83, Number 3
| Sponsored by the ACS Division of Nuclear Chemistry & Technology
Luciano G. Moretto started out his intellectual life both inquisitive and adventurous. If his research and reputation as a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory serve as a guide, he never lost a step since his days as a precocious child. One colleague calls him "perhaps the most distinguished active scientist working in the area of complex nuclear reactions." Another colleague adds, "His contributions to nuclear level densities, fission formalism, complex fragment emission, deeply inelastic reactions between heavy nuclei, multifragmentation reactions, and scaling theory," along with his "advanced arguments for the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition, have made him one--if not 'the'--world expert in statistical theory as applied to complex nuclear reactions." As a schoolboy, Moretto's tedious Greek and Latin grammar classes weren't enough to keep his curiosity satisfied. He supplemented his studies with physics and chemistry books from a small local library. He says his experiments left him with the "yellow stains of nitric acid and the black stains of silver nitrate." One night he synthesized nitroglycerin. Prompted by the "sweet and burning" taste a book told him nitroglycerin should have, he tasted the concoction. The strong vascular dilator left him with the worst headache of his life. Later on, Moretto says he earned the best score in all of Italy on that country's notoriously challenging "esame di maturitą classica," an exam taken at the end of high school. That performance secured him a scholarship to continue his studies. After receiving his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Pavia, Moretto set to work studying the yields of fission fragments. He then received a fellowship to work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on slow neutron, fast neutron, and electron-induced fission yields. He stayed in Berkeley for three years before returning to Italy temporarily to teach. In 1971, Moretto returned to Berkeley permanently and focused on the study of nuclear reactions. He spent the 1970s inducing fission with high-energy particles to determine, he says, how the shell structure "slowly fades away" with increasing energy. This work led to influential papers on nuclear level densities with John R. Huizenga. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Moretto's group studied deep-inelastic collisions between heavy nuclei. The group studied how energy and angular momentum relax from translational to internal motion. More recently, Moretto's group was able to interpret multifragmentation in terms of a liquid-vapor phase diagram. "It turns out that nuclear matter does behave very much like a van der Waals fluid," he says. He says this work "closed the circle" on his career in chemistry because of his familiarity with phase diagrams as a young university student working endlessly in a lab. "All of a sudden, we took the world of nuclear physics into a more mundane and human frame of understanding," he says. Also closing the circle is Moretto's hobby: using those grammar lessons to read classical Greek and Latin literature, which he enjoys every night. The award will be presented before the Division of Nuclear Chemistry & Technology.--ALEXANDER TULLO |
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2004 Glenn T. Seaborg Nuclear Chemistry Award |
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Donald Fleming |
from Chemical & Engineering News, January 5, 2004 - Volume 82, Number 1
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from Chemical & Engineering News, January 27, 2003 - Volume 81, Number 04
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2003 GLENN T. SEABORG AWARD FOR NUCLEAR CHEMISTRY |
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| Demetrios G. Sarantites |
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If there's one area of chemistry that requires heavy instrumental artillery, it's nuclear chemistry. To probe an atom's guts, scientists need accelerators to split or fuse nuclei and blast them into new energy states. And a whole science of sophisticated detector systems arose from the need to examine the complex trails of gamma rays spit out by rapidly spinning and highly excited (hot) nuclei.
Over the past several decades, chemistry professor Demetrios G. Sarantites, at Washington University, in St. Louis, has invented some of the most important such detectors used by nuclear scientists. And thanks to these instruments, not only has Sarantites himself been able to gain major insights into nuclear structures and processes, but hosts of other scientists have been able to make important discoveries as well.
Sarantites was born in 1933 in Athens, Greece. He received a B.S. in chemical engineering and an M.S. in chemistry from the Technical University of Athens in 1956. After a three-year service at the Greek Naval Academy, he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in nuclear and inorganic chemistry in 1963.
After postdoc positions at MIT and at Washington University, in 1964, Sarantites became an assistant professor at Washington University, where he has been ever since. Now a full professor, he has also held visiting professorships at the Nobel Institute of Physics in Stockholm; Niels Bohr Institute in Roskilde, Denmark; and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, Calif.
During the 1960s and '70s, Sarantites pioneered the use of germanium detectors for probing the nuclear structure of medium-sized atoms. In the early 1980s, he was responsible for the creation of the spin spectrometer, a groundbreaking spherical detector array installed at the Holifield Heavy Ion Research Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The spin spectrometer was the first to examine in great detail the gamma ray decay of excited nuclei.
Sarantites soon developed a spherical detector designed to measure the spectra of hydrogen and helium isotopes, known as the Dwarf Ball/Wall. This detector, used in combination with the spin spectrometer, gave scientists the ability to simultaneously monitor particles and gamma rays.
He also collaborated on the powerful, sophisticated Gammasphere detector system, an international project system at LBNL. In the 1990s, Sarantites developed the Microball, another small spherical detector that fit inside the Gammasphere. The two devices combined made for an extremely powerful, selective system. And with it, Sarantites was able to confirm the existence of the then-theorized "island of superdeformation" in rapidly spinning nuclei of around mass 80 and to study them extensively. He was also instrumental in the discovery and study of superdeformation in nuclei of mass 60, and very recently in mass 40.
Sarantites' latest device is Hercules, a new detector system used with the Gammasphere that can identify trans-lead and trans-actinide fusion products--a task made very difficult by their quick decay into fission products.
Throughout his illustrious 40-year career, Sarantites has also published over 250 papers and presented numerous lectures.
The award address will be presented before the Division of Nuclear Chemistry & Technology.--ELIZABETH WILSON
from Chemical & Engineering News, January 27, 2003 - Volume 81, Number 04
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Richard G. "Dick" Hahn |
ACS Award for Nuclear Chemistry Sponsored by Gordon & Breach Publishing Group
On a summer day in 1945, 10-year-old RICHARD L. HAHN was riding the subway in New York City while a nearby commuter read the New York Times. It was a day Hahn will never forget. "I saw the front page of the paper, and the headline announced the dropping of the first atomic bomb over Japan," Hahn recalls. "That was the very moment I became interested in nuclear science, and I've been interested ever since."
Most recently, Hahn's interests led to his involvement with construction of the high-profile Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), near Sudbury, Ontario. The observatory, located 6,800 feet underground, began operations last summer and is designed to detect neutrino interactions as they occur in real time. Hahn played a substantial role in designing the chemical aspects of the neutrino detector which contains 1,000 tons of pure heavy water, D2O in a 12-meter-wide transparent acrylic plastic vessel surrounded by 7,000 tons of purified light water, which acts as shielding.
Hahn also played a major role in designing and operating the international GALLEX Solar Neutrino Experiment, which operated a neutrino detector containing 30 tons of gallium in a 100-ton aqueous target at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Assergi, Italy. According to Hahn, the experiment which ended in 1997, led scientists to a deeper understanding of how the sun produces energy, as well as an understanding of the properties of neutrinos.
The results for GALLEX and the world's four other solar neutrino detectors have provided strong hints that the neutrino has a significant new property: nonzero mass. This potential for "new science" beyond current physics theories has generated great interest about neutrinos in the scientific community.
Before becoming interested in neutrinos, Hahn had already established himself as a prominent nuclear chemist. His areas of research have included the mechanisms of nuclear reactions induced by accelerated charged particles from protons to heavy ions up to uranium, charged-particle activation analysis, nuclear spectroscopy, discovery and characterization of new nuclides, solution chemistry of lanthanides and actinides, fission studies, and searches for super heavy elements.
In total, Hahn has published more than 100 articles on these and other subjects, as well as numerous articles in the World Book Encyclopedia aimed at students in grades seven through 12.
A native of New York City, Hahn studied nuclear chemistry at Columbia University where he received a Ph.D. degree in 1960. He left university life in 1960, taking a research associate position at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y. After leaving Brookhaven in 1962, Hahn joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he worked until 1987, serving in many positions, one of which was director of the Transuranium Research Laboratory from 1974 to 1984. In 1987, he returned to Brookhaven, where he continues his work today as a senior chemist.
As a visiting scientist, Hahn has worked in France, Germany, Italy, and Canada. He is an active member of several professional organizations and served as chairman of the American Chemical Society's Division of Nuclear Chemistry & Technology in 1980.
Among his other honors, Hahn was named a scholar in residence in 1983 by Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, and received the Radiation Industry Award of the American Nuclear Society in 1977 for his research on charged-particle activation analysis.
Ronald Rogers: from Chemical & Engineering News, January 17, 2000
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