Wednesday, May 14, 2003

WRITER: Phil Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
CONTACT: Henry F. Schafer III, 706/542-0364, hsfiii@uga.edu

UGA’S HENRY F. SCHAEFER III NAMED WINNER OF
CHEMISTRY’S REMSEN AWARD FOR 2003

ATHENS, Ga. – Henry F. Schaefer III, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, has been named recipient of the 2003 Remsen Award, an international honor given by the Maryland Section of the American Chemical Society.

Nineteen of the 57 recipients of the award have also received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

The Remsen Award was established in 1946 to commemorate the career of Ira Remsen – the first professor of chemistry and second president of Johns Hopkins University – as a chemist, educator and administrator. According to the awards committee, the Remsen Award lecturers are "chemists of outstanding achievement, in keeping with Ira Remsen’s long and devoted career as an exponent of the highest standards in teaching and research in chemistry."

The Remsen Award consists of a scroll and cash honorarium, which will be presented to Schaefer on the evening of May 29 at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He will deliver a lecture during the event.

Schaefer received his bachelor’s degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. After 18 years at the University of California, he moved to the University of Texas and then to UGA, where, in addition to his professorship, he is director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry.

His other academic appointments have included visiting professorships at the University of Paris, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Australian National University. Schaefer is the author of more than 975 scientific publications and has been an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.

He is also a recipient of the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry, the ACS Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award, the Schroedinger Medal, the Centenary Medal of the Royal Society and the 2003 ACS Award in Theoretical Chemistry.

A faculty member at UGA since 1987, he is one of the most-cited chemists in the world. His research involves the use of state-of-the-art computational hardware and theoretical methods to solve important problems in molecular quantum mechanics.

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