A. Welford Castleman
Albert Welford Castleman junior (born January 7, 1936 in Richmond (Virginia) , † February 28, 2017 in Arlington (Virginia) ) was an American physical chemist .
Castleman attended high school in Northport, Long Island (graduation 1953), studied chemical engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a bachelor's degree in 1957 and received his doctorate in 1969 at the Polytechnic Institute of New York . 1958 to 1975 he was a member of the Brookhaven National Laboratory . From 1973 to 1975 he was also adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook . From 1975 to 1982 he was a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and there a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). He then became a professor at Pennsylvania State University, from 1986 as Evan Pugh Professor and from 1999 as Eberly Family Distinguished Chair of Science in both the Faculty of Chemistry and the Faculty of Physics. In 2016 he retired.
He dealt with clusters of atoms and molecules and introduced the term superatom for clusters that behave similarly to atoms in the periodic table. Materials with novel properties can be built from this. He also looked at the impact of quantum confinement and solution on chemical reactions, materials science, catalysts, and atmospheric chemistry.
In 1992 he and his group synthesized the first metallocarbohedryne (met-car, first called metallo-carbohedrene ), compounds of the form (C is carbon, M is a transition metal such as titanium, vanadium, zirconium, iron, chromium, molybdenum, niobium, hafnium) . They can be used as catalysts, for example for desulphurisation of petroleum.
In 1997 he developed a method to isolate transition states with special femtosecond laser techniques and Coulomb explosion.
In 2001 he received the Wilhelm Jost Memorial Medal and in 2010 the Irving Langmuir Award . In 1998 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1985 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society . In 1989 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Senior Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1985 and 1997 and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Fellow at Caltech in 1977 . He was an honorary doctor of the University of Innsbruck and has received several Humboldt Research Awards (1986, 1996, 2007, 2008, 2009). In 1988 he received the American Chemical Society Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology.
From 1976 he was married to Heide Marie Engel, with whom he had a son.
Web links
- Castleman Group , Penn State
- In Memoriam , Penn State
Individual evidence
- ^ B. Guo, KP Kerns, AW Castleman: "Ti8C + 12-Metallo-Carbohedrenes: A New Class of Molecular Clusters?", Science, Volume 255, 1992, pp. 1411-1413
- ↑ Castleman receives 2010 Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics , Penn State News, November 2, 2009
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Castleman, A. Welford |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Castleman Junior, Albert Welford |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American chemist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 7, 1936 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Richmond, Virginia |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 28, 2017 |
| Place of death | Arlington, Virginia |