ARON KUPPERMANN

Aron Kuppermann was born in São Paulo, Brazil on 6 May 1926. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering in 1948, and in Civil Engineering in 1952, from the University of São Paulo. He served as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica in São José dos Campos (1950-51). He was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1953, and did his graduate work at the University of Notre Dame, where he received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in 1955.

From 1955 to 1963 he was Instructor, Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Illinois. He was appointed Professor of Chemical Physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1963. In 1965 the University of Notre Dame presented him with its Centennial of Science Award. That same year he also served as the University's Reilly Lecturer. In 1967 he was the Venable Lecturer at the University of North Carolina, and a year later was the Werner Lecturer at the University of Kansas. He was the Kolthoff Lecturer at the University of Minnesota in 1984.

He spent the 1968-69 academic year on sabbatical leave as a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam. He served as a member of the Advisory Board of the International Journal for Radiation Physics and Chemistry from 1968 to 1976, and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Physical Chemistry from 1965 to 1970. He was a member of the Joint U.S.-Brazil Science Cooperation Program on Graduate Teaching and Research in Chemistry sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences from 1969 to 1973 and its chairman from 1973 to 1976. He was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow at the Weizmann Institute and the University of São Paulo in 1976 and 1977.

During 1984, Kuppermann was a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visitor in the Theoretical Chemistry Department at Oxford University, and served as a Foreign Expert for the Chinese University Development Program, Chinese Ministry of Education at Shandong University, People's Republic of China. In 1992 he was a Visiting Research Associate at the Paris Observatory, Meudon, France. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Institute of Chemists.

Kuppermann has held consultantships at the Argonne National Laboratory, the Armour Research Foundation of the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Central Institute of Chemistry of the University of Brasília, the Instituto de Energia Atômica in São Paulo, Brazil, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, TRW Systems, Inc., Los Angeles, and Varian Associates of Palo Alto, California. He was also Councilor for Chemistry to the International Association for Radiation Research and to the Radiation Research Society, and a member of the Advisory Panel on Atomic and Molecular Properties for the National Standard Reference Data Program. He is a consultant for the World Bank on projects of Science and Technology.

Kuppermann's current major research interest is theoretical chemical dynamics. His past contributions include the areas of experimental gas phase photochemistry, reactions in crossed molecular beams, low-energy electron-impact spectroscopy, and angularly-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. He has been a pioneer in the quantum mechanical theory of chemical reactions and in the use of supercomputers for predicting the cross sections and rates of chemical reactions from the first principles of quantum mechanics. Since 1983 he has pioneered the use of parallel computers for these calculations. He has published over 200 papers, one half of them in theoretical chemistry. He has recently discontinued his experimental work and is devoting all of his research efforts to theoretical studies of chemical reactions.

Recent update:

Dear Prof. Berger -

Sadly, Prof. Aron Kuppermann passed away on October 15, 2011.

- Priscilla Boon

Assistant to Prof. Kuppermann