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Richard Zare - Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and Professor of Chemistry and (by courtesy) of Physics

Seed Grant Committee Member, Scientific Leadership Council Member, Clark Center Faculty

Dr. Zare graduated from Harvard University [B.A. degree in chemistry and physics (1961); Ph.D. in chemical physics (1964)] before becoming an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1965). In 1966 he moved to JILA, University of Colorado at Boulder, remaining there until 1969, when he was appointed full professor in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. In 1977 he moved to Stanford University, where he is presently Chair of the Chemistry Department. Professor Zare is renowned in the area of lasers applied to chemical reactions and to chemical analysis. He is the recipient of many awards including the National Medal of Science (1983), the Welch Award in Chemistry (1999), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2005), the Priestley Medal of the American Chemical Society (2010), and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers in Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences (2010).

Dr. Zare received the King Faisal International Prize in Science (2011).

Dr. Zare is renowned for his research in the area of laser chemistry, resulting in a greater understanding of chemical reactions at the molecular level. By experimental and theoretical studies he has made seminal contributions to our knowledge of molecular collision processes and contributed very significantly to solving a variety of problems in chemical analysis. His development of laser induced fluorescence as a method for studying reaction dynamics has been widely adopted in other laboratories.