
Stuart A. Rice
Wolf Prize Laureate in Chemistry 2011

Stuart A. Rice
Affiliation at the time of the award:
University of Chicago, USA
Award citation:
“For exploring the nature of organic solids and their energy profiles, structure and dynamics and for creating new ways to make organic materials, ranging from polymers, to organic-based devices that capture energy from the sun, and light our way in the dark. The researchers have been responsible for groundbreaking conceptual and experimental advances that have helped to create the research field of organic materials”.
Prize share:
Stuart A. Rice
Krzysztof Matyjaszewski
Ching Tang
From wood to walrus tusks, and from amber to sugar, solid materials based on organic molecules are part of the natural world. The interest of the chemical community in such materials goes back to the days of the alchemists. However, the creation of new organic materials, the discovery of their properties, and then the development of new devices based on organic materials, has been one of the great chapters in the annals of chemistry over the past two centuries.
Professor Stuart A. Rice (born 1932, USA) has influenced the course of virtually every aspect of contemporary physical chemistry, and has shaped its directions broadly and powerfully. He has been a leader in most thematic areas of chemical physics. Rice´s great advances in organic solids led directly to his distinctive later work on the dynamics of single molecules and on phase transition behavior. This, in turn, led to his epoch-making research on the photonic control of chemical reactions. Rice´s original and pioneering investigations (both theoretical and experimental) into the properties of organic solids helped to define and to characterize a panoply of behaviors, and to conceptualize and formulate a coherent set of concepts, such as exciton behaviors, radiationless transitions, light absorption and emission in organic crystals, charge transport, intramolecular vibrational relaxation, exciton fission and fusion, exchange forces in excitons, and dynamics of triplet excitons in solids.
