Professor George Schatz receives inaugural Marsha I. Lester Award for Exemplary Impact in Physical Chemistry

Congratulations are in order: Professor George Schatz has been named the inaugural recipient of the Marsha I. Lester Award for Exemplary Impact in Physical Chemistry by the Physical Chemistry Division of the ACS.

Marsha I. Lester is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. In recognition of her scientific accomplishments and service to the physical chemistry community, the Executive Committee of the ACS’s Physical Chemistry Division voted to create an award in her honor.

Schatz, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry and of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern, is a theoretician who studies the optical, structural and thermal properties of nanomaterials, including plasmonic nanoparticles, DNA and peptide nanostructures, and carbon-based materials. Schatz was also one of the pioneers in the application of quantum scattering methods to determine the cross sections and rates of simple gas phase reactions such as H + H₂.

In addition to his work at Northwestern, Schatz is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society and of the AAAS. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry from 2005 to 2019.  He appeared on the Times Higher Education list of Top 100 Chemists of the Past Decade (2000-2010), and has been on the Thompson-Reuters / Clarivate Analytics list of highly cited researchers since 2014.

He has previously received the ACS’s Debye and Langmuir Awards along with numerous others, including the Bourke and Boys-Rahman Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Schatz will be recognized at the Fall ACS Meeting in San Francisco in August 2023.