The Russ Pitzer Lecture
Russ Pitzer received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry with honors in 1959 from the California Institute of Technology, where he also played football. In 1963, he received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard University and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in the same year. From 1963–1968, Dr. Pitzer was a professor of chemistry at Cal Tech, until moving to The Ohio State University where he was promoted to Professor in 1979. He retired to Professor Emeritus in 2008.
In 1986, Dr. Pitzer co-founded the Ohio Supercomputer Center. In 1988 he became a trustee of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, an institution that was founded by his father, Kenneth Pitzer, who was also a highly regarded physical chemist.
Dr. Pitzer served as Chair of the Dept. of Chemistry at Ohio State from 1989–1994. He was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters at Pitzer College in 2003. He has held visiting faculty positions at Berkeley, Bielefeld (Germany), Cambridge (England) and the University of Georgia.
Dr. Pitzer’s doctoral thesis, Calulation of the Barrier to Internal Rotation in Ethane, is considered a genuine landmark in the history of theoretical chemistry and he pioneered development of the COLUMBUS computer program, one of the first software packages for computing the electronic structure of molecules. Professor Pitzer's autobiography, along with a professional and scientific biography written by longtime Ohio State colleague Isaiah Shavitt, can be found as part of the Russell Pitzer Festschrift in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A.
Previous Lecturers:
2025 - H. Bernard Schlegel
2024 - Garnet Chan
2023 - Zaida Luthey-Schulten
2022 - Tamar Schlick
2019 - Todd Martinez
2018 - Gustavo Scuseria
2017 - J. Andrew McCammon
2016 - Emily Carter
2015 - William Goddard
2014 - Klaus Schulten
2013 - Michele Parrinello
2012 - Martin Head-Gordon
2011 - William H. Miller
2010 - Rodney Bartlett
2009 - Fritz Schaefer
2008 - Thom Dunning
