Steven J. Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry and The James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago, and Fellow of the UChicago Institute for Molecular Engineering, has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of forefront areas of modern chemistry, materials research, and physics encompassing nanoscience, chemical physics, gas-surface interactions, surface and materials chemistry, catalytic reaction kinetics, polymeric systems, and the chemistry of ice.
His contributions have focused on elucidating the atomic-level dynamical properties of interfaces, as well as the chemical processes and physical transformations that occur on such interfaces at the nanoscale.
Molecular beam scattering, scanning probe microscopy imaging, numerical simulations and theory all play prominent roles in his research.
He is especially proud of the accomplishments achieved by the many outstanding postdoctoral fellows, graduate, undergraduate, and high school students who have participated in his research program.
Amongst his many honors are the Marlow Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Arthur W. Adamson Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Surface Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, and the American Vacuum Society Prairie Chapter Award for Outstanding Research.
He is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, American Vacuum Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been twice elected a Visiting Fellow of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA).
He has served as Director of The James Franck Institute, the NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at the University of Chicag, the multi-university DoD MURI Center for Materials Chemistry in the Space Environment, and the multi-university NSF-CCI Center for Energetic Non-Equilibrium Chemistry at Interfaces.
He has chaired the two faculty committees that recommended forming the new Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and helped to define its ambitious horizons.
He was the inaugural Director of the University of Chicago's IME Water Research Initiative.
Sibener received his Sc.B. in chemistry and B.A. in physics, both with honors, from the University of Rochester, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Yuan T. Lee. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories.
