Alec Wodtke

Director of the Partnership for International Research and Education for Electron Chemistry and Catalysis at Interfaces

Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at UC Santa Barbara

Alec Wodtke graduated magna cum laude with a major in chemistry from the University of Utah in 1981. He received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley in 1986 with Yuan T. Lee. His work there was awarded both a National Science Foundation pre-doctoral Fellowship and an American Chemical Society Graduate Fellowship. From 1986-88, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Goettingen, Germany with Prof. Peter Andresen before joining the faculty at UCSB in 1988. He received tenure in 1993 and became full Professor in 1996. He has received a Presidential Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. At UCSB, Professor Wodtke established a vigorous research program focused on the study of the chemical properties of highly vibrationally excited molecules. This work has concerned itself with the fundamental nature of collisions of molecules in large amplitude vibrational states, the role of highly vibrationally excited molecules in stratospheric ozone formation, the quantum picture of isomerization as well as the nature of large amplitude vibrational motions interacting with metal surfaces. Professor Wodtke has also made significant contributions to experimental methodology for studying photochemical dynamics, in particular developing one of the earliest high resolution approaches to the measurement of correlated product state distributions between photo-fragment pairs: "quantum-state-specific neutral time-of-flight". His group has published over 100 papers in the field of Physical Chemistry. Professor Wodtke served as spokesperson for the Chemical Dynamics Beam line at the Advanced Light Source from 1995-1999. He began serving as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCSB in 2003.