Argonne chemist Stephen Klippenstein delivers Royal Society of Chemistry’s Spiers Memorial Lecture

The lecture is one of the society’s top honors.

Stephen Klippenstein, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, was awarded one of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s top honors recently when he was invited to deliver the Spiers Memorial Lecture at the June 2022 Faraday Discussion meeting on Unimolecular Reactions.  

Klippenstein’s research focuses on combining calculations, theory and master equation modeling to obtain high accuracy theoretical predictions. His work often concentrates on exploring and improving the accuracy of such calculations. Another aim involves the use of such methods to understand novel experimental observations and to improve global models for the chemistry of complex environments. 

“I’m truly honored to have been invited to present at this event. The long-term support of my effort from the Gas Phase Chemical Physics program of DOE Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences was instrumental to my contributions to the progress reviewed in this lecture.” — Stephen Klippenstein, Argonne chemist

Klippenstein’s Spiers Memorial Lecture: Theory of Unimolecular Reactions focused on how the interaction between state-of-the art theory and groundbreaking experiments has advanced research on the temperature and pressure dependence of these reactions throughout the past century. The process has yielded a transformation of theoretical gas phase kinetics from empirical modeling in support of experiment to a largely predictive science. Nevertheless, there are still many interesting challenges and frontiers to explore.   

“I’m truly honored to have been invited to present at this event. The long-term support of my effort from the Gas Phase Chemical Physics program of DOE Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences was instrumental to my contributions to the progress reviewed in this lecture,” Klippenstein said.  

The Spiers Memorial Lecture was established in 2020 as the successor to the prestigious Spiers Memorial Award, which was first presented in 1929 and ran until 2020. The memorial award was previously presented in recognition of an individual who made an outstanding contribution to the field of a Faraday Discussion. Each Spiers Memorial Award winner acted as the introductory lecturer to a Faraday Discussion, and up to two awards could be awarded per calendar year.  

In 2020, as part of a series of changes of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s recognition programs, this award evolved to become the Spiers Memorial Lecture. The lecture is delivered by the introductory lecturer at each Faraday Discussion meeting and is accompanied by a medal presented at the meeting banquet. Lecturers and introductory lectures of previous Faraday Discussion meetings are available online

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