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Regents Professor Donald Truhlar has received the 2012 Faraday Division Chemical Dynamics Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry. This award honors scientists for their outstanding innovative research on the dynamics of molecules, including spectroscopy, kinetics, or molecular interactions in the gas, liquid, or solid phase.
Truhlar is one of the University of Minnesota Department of Chemistry's most distinguished professors and researchers. He is also one of the top physical chemists in the world.
In his nomination letter for this award, Chemistry Professor Christopher Cramer noted four of Truhlar's outstanding research areas, including his work on variational transition state theory; quantum mechanical scattering theory for reaction dynamics; spectroscopy of the transition state; and potential energy surfaces.
Truhlar has received many prestigious awards and honors for his research and his seminal contributions that have advanced and transformed chemistry and chemical physics. He has written more than 900 journal articles and 80 book chapters, and has edited or co-edited 13 books.
Truhlar's teaching and advising record also is unparalleled. He has taught numerous graduate and undergraduate courses, and has mentored 144 graduate students and postdoctoral associates and 70 undergraduate research students.
His additional contributions to the scientific community include serving as an associate editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society and editor of Computer Physics Communications. Truhlar also is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.