Alec Wodtke wins 2022 Ertl Lecture Prize
The Director at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences is honored for his contributions to improving our understanding of surface chemistry. (mpinat)The 15th Gerhard Ertl Lecture Award goes to Alec M. Wodtke, Director at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences and Professor at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the University of Göttingen. The Award Committee, comprised of jurors Joachim Sauer (HU Berlin), Matthias Drieß (TU Berlin), Eckart Rühl (FU Berlin), as well as the Fritz-Haber-Institut's Board of Directors and Gerhard Ertl himself, have chosen to honor Alec M. Wodtke in recognition of his contributions to improving our understanding of surface chemistry. -He is an international leader in the study of the dynamics of interactions between molecules and surfaces, and I am very pleased that he has won this year's Lecture Award-, comments Nobel Laureate Gerhard Ertl. Before joining the Max Planck Society and the University of Göttingen, he held a full Professorship in the Chemistry Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Both in the US and in Germany, Prof. Wodtke has done outstanding research on electronically nonadiabatic interactions in surface reactions, the importance of which has been demonstrated by dynamical studies that reveal the atomic scale motion involved in surface reactions. His -Dynamics at Surfaces- group co-located at the MPI for Multidisciplinary Science and the University of Göttingen has also developed improved measurement tools for obtaining reaction rates in surface chemistry, thus providing benchmarks for theory.
