Henry “Fritz” Schaefer, the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, has been selected to receive the 2014 Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry. Sponsored by E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., the late Dutch-American physicist, chemist and Nobel laureate who was successor to Albert Einstein in several academic appointments in Europe in the early 20th century. In 1912, Debye extended Einstein’s theory of specific heat and developed a method that became known as the Debye Model for estimating the phonon contribution to the heat capacity in a solid.
The American Chemical Society has 200,000 members and gives more than 50 awards annually. Of these, the Debye Award is one of the three most prestigious.
Schaefer, who is director of the UGA Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, was recognized for the development of new methods in quantum chemistry and for many applications to molecular structure, spectroscopy and reaction dynamics.
Schaefer previously has been honored with several awards for his discoveries in and influence on advances in chemistry.