George C. Schatz
George Chappell Schatz, the Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, is a theoretical chemist best known for his seminal contributions to the fields of reaction dynamics and nanotechnology.
Early life and career
Born in Watertown, New York and raised in Sackets Harbor, New York, he obtained his B. S. in chemistry from Clarkson University in 1971. At Clarkson, he was mentored by organic chemistry professor Richard Partsch, who encouraged him to spend a summer working at Argonne National Laboratory in 1971. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from Caltech in 1976 under Aron Kuppermann. While working on his doctorate, he took classes taught by Richard Feynman on quantum electrodynamics and particle physics. Following postdoctoral work at MIT under John Ross, he joined the chemistry department at Northwestern University. Schatz is a member of the Center for Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit.To date he has co-authored over 1000 scientific papers and co-authored two books with his colleague Mark A. Ratner: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics in Chemistry and Quantum Mechanics in Chemistry. Recently much of Schatz's research has been concerned with nanotechnology and bionanotechnology. His work has collectively received over 130,000 citations, including a 2003 article on the optical properties of nanoparticles which has been cited more than 12,000 times.
A longtime senior editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry, he became its editor-in-chief in 2005. The journal previously having been split in Journal of Physical Chemistry A and Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Schatz initiated the spin-off of a third journal, Journal of Physical Chemistry C, focusing on nanotechnology and molecular electronics.