IB a w a r d s Gabor Somorjai Named 2000 Pauling Award Medalist The American Chemical Society's Oregon, Portland, and Puget Sound Sections have named Gabor A. Somorjai the recipient of the 2000 Pauling Award. The award, which honors Linus Pauling, the 1954 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and a native of the Pacific Northwest, consists of a gold medal. Recipients are recognized for contributions to chemistry of national and international significance. Somorjai, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, will receive the award following a symposium entitled "Surface Science and Catalysis at the Frontiers of Chemistry," which will be held on Oct. 21 at Western Washington University, Bellingham. Somorjai is known for his work in developing the molecular foundations of surface science, with particular emphasis on heterogeneous catalysis. In the mid-1960s, Somorjai used low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) to make the important discovery that clean Pt(100) surfaces reconstruct. In surface reconstruction, atoms at a surface assume positions different from what one would expect if the bulk structure of the material were abruptly terminated. Somorjai's proposal of clean-surface reconstruction for the Pt(100) single-crystal surface was controversial at the time, but since then many other surfaces have been observed to exhibit reconstruction and the phenomenon is no longer considered surprising. Subsequent to the Pt(100) work, Somorjai used a variety of surface structural techniques to probe increasingly complex surfaces. Research in his laboratory included the first studies of adsorption on stepped surfaces, the first investigation of surface melting and freezing using LEED, the first surface structural studies of molecular crystals, and the first structural characterization of an adsorbed organic molecule using LEED. In addition to his groundbreaking studies of surface structure, Somorjai developed thefieldin which model sys-
tems are used to probe heterogeneous catalysis reactions. Using molecular beam scattering methods, he directly showed that steps on platinum surfaces are essential for dissociation of hydrogen, a key process in many surface-catalyzed reactions. Somorjai also pioneered the use of single-crystal metal surfaces as model catalysts to investigate the kinetics and mechanisms of heterogeneous catalysis reactions. His development of a high-pressure catalytic reactor that could be isolated from an ultrahigh vacuum allowed the use of electron spectroscopic techniques for characterizing single-crystal catalyst surfaces immediately before and after high-pressure experiments. This approach enables the correlation of the high-pressure kinetics of a catalytic reaction with the structural and compositional characterization of the single-crystal catalyst Most recently, Somorjai has incorporated scanning tunneling microscopy and sumfrequencygeneration into the wide array of techniques used in his laboratory to investigate surfaces. Somorjai studied chemical engineering at Technical University, Budapest, receiving a B.S. degree in 1956. He then left Hungary to emigrate to the U.S., where he received a Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley in 1959. Following that, he took a position with the solid-state materials group at IBM Research. In 1964, Somorjai accepted a faculty position in chemistry at Berkeley, where has been ever since. He has also been a principal investigator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since that time. Somorjai has published more than 750 articles and has authored three textbooks. He serves on the editorial boards of 14 journals and is coeditor-in-chief of Catalysis Letters. His extensive list of awards includes the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society, as well as ACS's Adamson, Debye, and Colloid & Surface Chemistry Awards and Award for Creative Research in Catalysis. Somorjai is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The Pauling Award symposium will
begin at 1:30 PM on Saturday, Oct. 21, and will be followed by a reception that is open to the public. A dinner followed by the Pauling Medal presentation will begin at 7 PM, with all activities held on the Western Washington University campus. For more information, call (360) 650-2883 or visit the Pauling Award website (http://atom.chem.wwu.edu/acs/ pauling2000).
