斯图尔特·阿兰·赖斯1932—2024

Stuart Alan Rice (January 6, 1932 – December 22, 2024) was an American theoretical chemist and physical chemist. He was well known as a theoretical chemist who also performed experimental research, having spent much of his career working in multiple areas of physical chemistry. He was the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Rice trained more than 100 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999.

Education and career

Stuart Rice attended the Bronx High School of Science, received his bachelor's degree in 1952 from Brooklyn College, and earned his master's and doctorate from Harvard University in 1954 and 1955, respectively. He was almost unable to attend graduate school due to contracting tuberculosis, but was cured of the disease through an experimental treatment of isoniazid and streptomycin. He remained at Harvard as a junior fellow for three years, although he spent the last two years of the fellowship doing research work at Yale University's chemistry department. After the fellowship, he joined the faculty of The University of Chicago in 1957, where he remained until his death.

Rice served the university in a wide variety of capacities during his fifty-seven year tenure. He served as the director of the James Franck Institute (the university's center for physical chemistry and condensed matter physics) from 1961 to 1967.

Research

Rice began his scientific career as a high school student and published on this work. He completed his doctoral dissertation under Paul Doty, contributing to the then-emerging field of DNA research; the project shared both experimental and theoretical components, which became a hallmark of his later work.

During his time at Yale, Stuart Rice began to study the transport properties of liquids. He helped to determine the properties of liquid noble gases and methane, while also exploring the theoretical background of transport in liquids as well, comparing the results to simulations of Lennard-Jones fluids.

Personal life and death

Rice was famous at the University of Chicago for eating lunch almost every weekday at the university's Quadrangle Club restaurant (a faculty club), where he dined over 9,000 times. Rice was known to sit at the head of the chemistry table, not because he was the most senior member of the department, but because he was very tall.

Rice was married to Marian Coopersmith from 1952 until her death in 1994. From 1997 to his own death, Rice was married to Ruth O'Brien. He died on December 22, 2024, at the age of 92.

Honors and awards

Rice was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific prize awarded in the United States, in 1999. He was awarded the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2011, along with Krzysztof Matyjaszewski and Ching Tang. He was a Fellow of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1970, Rice was awarded the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, a highly esteemed faculty award at The University of Chicago.

Impact

Over the course of his long career Rice has shaped much debate on theoretical physical chemistry. He is cited on the National Medal of Science "for changing the very nature of modern physical chemistry through his research, teaching and writing, using imaginative approaches to both experiment and theory that have inspired a new generation of scientists." With over 100 doctoral students to his credit, Stuart Rice has had a great impact on the field of physical chemistry simply through the number of research scientists he has trained. Theoretical chemist David Tannor, who is the Hermann Mayer Professorial Chair in the department of chemical physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, did his post-doc work with Stuart Rice and David W. Oxtoby at the University of Chicago.