| 1 | Name: | Dr. R. Stephen Berry | |
| Institution: | University of Chicago | ||
| Year Elected: | 2011 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1931 | ||
| Death Date: | July 26, 2020 | ||
R. Stephen Berry was the James Franck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. He had been at The University of Chicago since 1964; previously he was an Assistant Professor at Yale, and earlier, an Instructor at the University of Michigan. He is a Denver native, and in East High School, a Finalist in what was then the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. In September, 2011, he was inducted into the East High Alumni Heritage Hall. He went to Harvard, where he earned his A.B. and Ph.D., and met Carla Friedman, whom he married in 1955. In his career, he has worked on a variety of subjects ranging from strictly scientific matters to a variety of topics in policy. He has held visiting professorships at other universities, including the University of Copenhagen (1967 and 1979), the Université de Paris-Sud (1979-80), the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo (1984), and Oxford University (1973-74, 1980 and in 1986-87, as the Newton-Abraham Professor). He spent 1994 at the Freie Universität Berlin as an awardee of the Humboldt Prize. He has close associations with the Aspen Center for Physics (Board of Directors, 1978-84) and was a co-founder of the Telluride Summer Research Center (now Telluride Science Research Center) (Board of Directors, 1984-present; President, 1989-93). In 1983 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was its Home Secretary from 1999 until 2003. He was also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Vice-President, 1987-90) and is a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy. In 1997, he received the Heyrovsky Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 2010, he received a Diploma Science Honoris Causa from the Romanian Medical Society. His scientific research has been both theoretical and experimental, in areas of atomic and molecular clusters and chaos, topographies and dynamics of complex potential surfaces, atomic collisions and photoionization, protein dynamics and interactions, and, for many years, finite-time thermodynamics, a new approach to extend thermodynamics toward energy efficiency. His experimental work included studies of negative ions, detection and reactions of transient molecular species, photoionization and other laser-matter interactions. Some of his work outside traditional science has involved interweaving thermodynamics with economics and resource policy, including efficient use of energy. He has sometimes worked since the mid-1970s with issues of science and the law, and with management of scientific data. He has also worked in matters of scientific ethics and of some aspects of national security. His current scientific interests include the dynamics of atomic and molecular clusters, the basis of "guided" protein folding and other "structure-seeking" processes, and the thermodynamics of time-constrained processes and the efficient use of energy. He has been author or coauthor of five books, including one on thermodynamic optimization and one on the total social costs of coal and nuclear power. He was author or coauthor of over 530 published papers. | |||