Cynthia M. Friend

Cynthia Marie Friend (born March 16, 1955 in Hastings , Nebraska ) is an American chemist and chemical engineer. She is Theodore Williams Richards Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University . She deals with surface chemistry and catalysis and materials science.

Friend studied at the Davis University of California, with a Bachelor's degree in 1977 and in 1981 at the University of California, Berkeley in Earl Muetterties with work Surface Studies of nickel in chemical doctorate . After a post-doctoral period at Stanford University and in research at General Motors, she became an assistant professor at Harvard University in 1982, where she became Morris Kahn Associate Professor in 1988 and Theodore Williams Richards Professor in 1989. At Harvard, she was Head of the Chemistry Faculty and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. From 2002 to 2011 she was Co-Principal Investigator at MRSEC in Harvard (Material Research Science and Engineering Center).

In her laboratory, she deals with the development of energy-efficient, sustainable chemical processes with heterogeneous catalysis. To do this, she developed detailed models of reactivity on surfaces. In particular, she deals with oxidation catalysis on gold, silver and copper and their alloys, as well as the control of the chemical properties of metal oxides (substances especially suitable for photocatalysis) for the catalysis of thermodynamically unfavorable reactions such as splitting water, reducing carbon dioxide and oxidation and reduction of oxygen-containing environmental pollutants.

She also dealt with the surface chemistry of metal deposits on semiconductors, including in the 1980s in collaboration with IBM.

In 1991 she received the Garvan Olin Medal , in 2009 the George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry and in 2017 the ACS Award in Surface Chemistry . In 1985 she received a Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 2018 Friend was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 2019 to the National Academy of Sciences .

She is the editor of the Accounts of Chemical Research and has served on the editorial boards of ACS Catalysis , Chemical Science, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society . From 1992 she was on the Council for Chemistry of the National Research Council.

In 2011/12 she was Associate Director of the SLAC . 1983 to 1988 she worked at the National Synchrotron of the Brookhaven National Laboratory .

She has been married since 1980 and has two children.

She is not to be confused with the microbiologist Cynthia Friend (* 1940), professor at the University of Maine.

Web links

• Friend Lab at Harvard

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The life data, publications and academic family tree of Cynthia Marie Friend at academictree.org, accessed on February 6, 2018.
2. ↑ Career data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004.