Stuart Alan Rice (January 6, 1932 – December 22, 2024) was an American theoretical chemist and physical chemist. He was well known as a theoretical chemist who also performed experimental research, having spent much of his career working in multiple areas of physical chemistry. He was the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Rice trained more than 100 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999. received his bachelor's degree in 1952 from Brooklyn College, and earned his master's and doctorate from Harvard University in 1954 and 1955, respectively. He was almost unable to attend graduate school due to contracting tuberculosis, but was cured of the disease through an experimental treatment of isoniazid and streptomycin. served as editor for the journals Chemical Physics Letters and Advances in Chemical Physics, and co-authored several physical chemistry textbooks with Stephen Berry and John Ross.

Research

Rice began his scientific career as a high school student and published on this work. He completed his doctoral dissertation under Paul Doty, contributing to the then-emerging field of DNA research;

Rice was married to Marian Coopersmith from 1952 until her death in 1994. From 1997 to his own death, Rice was married to Ruth O'Brien. He died on December 22, 2024, at the age of 92.

Honors and awards

Rice was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific prize awarded in the United States, in 1999. He was awarded the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2011, along with Krzysztof Matyjaszewski and Ching Tang. He was a Fellow of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1970, Rice was awarded the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, a highly esteemed faculty award at The University of Chicago. With over 100 doctoral students to his credit, Stuart Rice has had a great impact on the field of physical chemistry simply through the number of research scientists he has trained. Theoretical chemist David Tannor, who is the Hermann Mayer Professorial Chair in the department of chemical physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, did his post-doc work with Stuart Rice and David W. Oxtoby at the University of Chicago. Paul Alivisatos, president of University of Chicago, who studied with Rice as an undergraduate, remembers his teaching as "exact and illuminating and inspiring. As long as he continued to speak, he rendered his difficult subject with simplicity and clarity."

References

  • Stuart Rice Profile
  • Guide to the Stuart Alan Rice Papers 1947-2004 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center