APS Member History

1	Name:	Dr. Jack David Dunitz
	Institution:	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich
	Year Elected:	1997
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	International
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1923
	Death Date:	September 12, 2021

	Jack Dunitz's research interests concentrated on the use of crystal structure analysis as a tool for studying a diversity of chemical problems, such as the structure and reactivity of medium-ring compounds, ion-specificity of natural and synthetic ionophores, and molecular structure-energy relationships. From his laboratory came the method of deriving model pathways for prototypic chemical reactions from the structural information in crystal structures, thus making a connection between the "statics" of crystals and the "dynamics" of reacting chemical systems. Other work in related directions included new interpretations of atomic displacement tensors in crystals in terms of internal molecular motions, and studies of experimental electron density distributions from accurate low-temperature X-ray data. Later in his career, he turned to problems of polymorphism, phase transformations in solids and solid-state chemical reactions. Dr. Dunitz studied chemistry at Glasgow University (Ph.D. 1947) and held research fellowship at Oxford University (1946-1948, 1951-1953), the California Institute of Technology (1948-1951, 1953-1954), the U.S. National Institute of Health (1954-1955) and the Royal Institution, London (1956-1957) before accepting a professorship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1957. He held that post until his retirement in 1990, when he became Emeritus Professor of Chemical Crystallography. Dr. Dunitz been elected to membership of several learned societies, including the Royal Society (1974) and has received several awards for his work. In 2001 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He has more than 300 scientific papers to his credit and is the author of "X-Ray Analysis and the Structure of Organic Molecules" (1979) and "Reflections on Symmetry in Chemistry... and Elsewhere" (1993). Jack Dunitz died on September 12, 2021 at age 98.

2	Name:	Dr. Claudio Vita-Finzi
	Institution:	Natural History Museum, London
	Year Elected:	1997
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	105. Physical Earth Sciences
	Residency:	International
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1936

	Claudio Vita-Finzi is a Scientific Associate at London’s Natural History Museum. Educated in Argentina and the UK, he received his PhD and ScD from Cambridge University. He held a personal chair in Neotectonics at University College London between 1988 and 2001 before moving to the Department of Mineralogy at the Museum. Dr Vita-Finzi has worked on geological chronologies in a wide variety of settings as a means of elucidating the underlying processes. His studies of river deposits in the Mediterranean and the Near East revealed the great changes in the natural landscape of Eurasia that have occurred in the last two millennia. He went on to analyse fault history and the buckling of lithospheric plates in Greece, the Near East, SE Asia and South America, and the role of impacts in the evolution of Venus. His current studies focus on the hydrologic effects of changes in the UV component of solar luminosity. Dr Vita-Finzi is the author of numerous papers on geochronology, tectonics, fluvial geology and geoarchaeology. His books include The Mediterranean Valleys (1969), Recent Earth History (1973), Archaeological Sites in their Setting (1978), Recent Earth Movements (1986), Monitoring the Earth (2002), Planetary Geology (2005), The Sun - a User’s Guide (2008), and A History of the Solar System (2016). He received the G K Warren Prize of the National Academy of Sciences in 1994 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1997. In 2012 he was elected to the British Academy.

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