Professor Raphael Levine has been elected to the Honorary Board of the International Society for Theoretical Chemical Physics (ISTCP).
“We congratulate the new members and thank them for their invaluable work towards the aims of the Society,” said ISTCP President Professor Erkki Brändas. “We will continually look forward to the overall participation of the Honorary Board with the Board of Directors and the National Representatives in their continued efforts to promote theoretical methods in chemical physics and their applications to chemical physics phenomena.”
The announcement of Levine’s promotion to the Honorary Board was made at the 10th Triennial Congress of ISTCP in Tromsø, Norway, in July 2019.
A distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of medical and molecular pharmacology at UCLA, Levine joined the UCLA faculty in 1989. A theorist and biophysicist, he is known for his contributions in the modern theory of chemically reactive collisions and unimolecular reactions and has played a major role in the application of the principles of quantum mechanics to the description of physical change in a reaction from a microscopic point of view. The National Academy writes: “Levine has been a leader in establishing chemical reaction dynamics as an identifiable area in chemical physics. His “surprisal analysis” has become an IUPAC official term. His work in the role of energy in chemical reactions has been seminal.”
Levine received his graduate degrees at Nottingham University and Oxford University and he has honorary degrees from the Technische Universität München and from Liege University. He has been the Miller Research Professor at the University of California, Berkeley; the Andrew D. White Professor- at-Large at Cornell University; and the Max Born Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Hebrew University. Levine has received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for his theories of selectivity and specificity that underlie his surprisal analysis. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
