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John Ross | |
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| Born | (1926-10-02)October 2, 1926 |
| Died | February 18, 2017(2017-02-18) (aged 90) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral students | Jennifer Logan |
John Ross (October 2, 1926 – February 18, 2017) was a scientist in physical chemistry and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry atStanford University.[1]
Born inVienna in 1926, Ross left Austria with his parents only days before the outbreak of World War II. They settled in New York, where he studied chemistry atQueens College (B.S. 1948), with a two-year interruption to serve in the Army from 1944 to 1946.[1] After completing his degree, he went on to perform doctoral research in physical chemistry, studying gas transport properties under the guidance ofIsador Amdur at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 1951).[1] This led to postdoctoral work in gas thermometry and the statistical mechanical theory of irreversible processes with physical chemistJohn Kirkwood atYale. Ross began his faculty career as assistant professor in chemistry atBrown University in 1953.[1] There, he launched a program to test theviscosity of liquids as a function of temperature and pressure with unprecedented precision. Two years later, he and physical chemist Edward Forbes Greene began nearly two decades of work developing the use ofmolecular beams to examine themolecular dynamics – revealing details of molecular collisions, dispersion, and more during chemical reactions. In 1966 Ross joined the chemistry department faculty at MIT, where he served as chair from 1966 to 1971.[1] He came to Stanford in 1979 as professor of chemistry and was department chair from 1983 to 1989. Among many honors recognizing his broad contributions inphysical chemistry, Professor Ross was named to theNational Academy of Sciences andAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and received theU.S. National Medal of Science in 2000 fromPresident Clinton.[2][3][4]
In his research at Stanford, Ross examined experimental and theoretical investigations in new approaches to the determination of complex reaction mechanisms, the formation of the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of systems far from equilibrium, the chemical implementation of digital and parallel computers, and application of these studies to biological reaction mechanisms.
