Henry F. Schaefer III

Schaefer was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was educated in Syracuse, New York; Menlo Park, California; and East Grand Rapids, Michigan.[1][14]

He was awarded a B.S. degree in chemical physics by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966, where he had the opportunity to work with scientists including George Whitesides, John C. Slater, F. Albert Cotton, Richard C. Lord, and Walter R. Thorson.[1]

He then received a National Defense Education Act Fellowship which enabled him to earn a Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from Stanford University in 1969. At Stanford he worked with Frank E. Harris on ab initio electronic structure theory and quantum chemistry.[1][6] For his Ph.D. thesis work, he examined the electronic structure of first-row atoms and the oxygen molecule.[15] He published 12 articles in journals including Physical Review and Physical Review Letters prior to defending his dissertation.[1]

Schaefer became an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969, with access to Berkeley's Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600 mainframe computer. Through collaborations with other researchers, he also gained access to resources at the University Computing Company (UCC) in Palo Alto, which had a UNIVAC 1108. He worked at Berkeley from 1969 to 1987, with one exception. Schaefer spent 1979-1980 as the Wilfred T. Doherty Professor of Chemistry and inaugural Director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin, before deciding to return to Berkeley. During his time at Berkeley, Schaefer published 375 papers and several books, including The Electronic Structure of Atoms and Molecules: A Survey of Rigorous Quantum Mechanical Results (1972) and Quantum Chemistry: The Development of Ab Initio Methods in Molecular Electronic Structure Theory (1984), a survey of research with commentary.[1]

In August 1987, Schaefer moved to the University of Georgia as Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the newly formed Center for Computational Chemistry. With the help of an IBM 3090-200E mainframe (as well as later models) he and his research group developed various computer-based methods for advanced quantum chemistry.[1]

Other academic appointments include Professeur d'Echange at the University of Paris (1977), Gastprofessur at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochshule (ETH), Zurich (1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010), and David P. Craig Visiting professor at the Australian National University (1999).[16] In 2004, he became Professor of Chemistry Emeritus, at UC Berkeley.[17]

Schaefer became a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS) in 1984.[18][19] He was elected president of WATOC (World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists) in 1996,[20] and held the position until 2005.[21] He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society as of 1977,[22] of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as of 2002,[23] and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as of 2004.[24][25]

As of January, 2020, Schaefer was the author of more than 1,600 peer-reviewed publications.[11] A majority of these appeared in the Journal of Chemical Physics, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the Journal of Physical Chemistry.[26] He was the editor of Molecular Physics for 11 years. He has directed 123 Ph.D. students, as well as many postdoctoral associates and visiting professors, now working at 42 academic institutions around the world.[11]

Research within the Schaefer group involves the use of computational hardware and theoretical methods to solve problems in molecular quantum mechanics. His contributions to the field of quantum chemistry include a paper challenging, on theoretical grounds, the geometry of triplet methylene as assigned by Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Gerhard Herzberg; the development of the Z-vector method simplifying certain calculations of correlated systems; and a wide body of work undertaken in his research group on the geometries, properties, and reactions of chemical systems using highly accurate ab initio quantum chemical techniques. Many of these papers have predicted, or forced a reinterpretation of, experimental results.[1][6]

Henry F. Schaefer III, AIC Gold Medal, 2019

Schaefer was awarded the American Chemical Society's ACS Award in Pure Chemistry in 1979[2] "for the development of computational quantum chemistry into a reliable quantitative field of chemistry and for prolific exemplary calculations of broad chemical interest".[27]^: 183 The Pure Chemistry Award is given to the outstanding chemist in America under the age of 35. In 1983, he received the Leo Hendrik Baekeland award for the most distinguished North American chemist under the age of 40. In 1992, he was awarded the Centenary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, London, with a citation that included "the first theoretical chemist successfully to challenge the accepted conclusion of a distinguished experimental group for a polyatomic molecule, namely methylene."[28]

In 2003, Schaefer received the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry and the Ira Remsen Award of Johns Hopkins University.[6] In 2004, a six-day conference was convened in Gyeongju, Korea on the “Theory and Applications of Computational Chemistry: A Celebration of 1000 Papers of Professor Henry F. Schaefer III.”[29] Schaefer was honored with the $10,000 Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in 2005 by the University of Wisconsin's Theoretical Chemistry Institute, joining a distinguished list of some of the best-known scientists in the field.[7]

In 2011, Schaefer received the prestigious Ide P. Trotter Prize of Texas A&M University. Previous recipients of the Trotter Prize include Nobelists Francis Crick, Charles Townes, Steven Weinberg, William Phillips, and Roald Hoffmann.[30] In 2012, he received a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany,[31] and on March 29, 2012, he received the $20,000 SURA Distinguished Scientist Award, given to the outstanding scientist in any field in the 17 Southern states of the US, for fulfilling SURA's mission of fostering excellence in scientific research.[32]

In 2013, Schaefer received the Chemical Pioneer Award of the American Institute of Chemists.[33] On March 18, 2014, Professor Schaefer received the American Chemical Society Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry.[8] In March 2015, Professor Schaefer was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Chemical Research Society of India. He returned to India to give his CRSI Honorary Fellow award lecture on February 6, 2016, at Panjab University in Chandigarh.[34] Schaefer received the American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal on May 8, 2019.[9]