Sylvia T. Ceyer

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Sylvia T. Ceyer
Born Chicago, Illinois
Nationality American
Fields Physical chemist
Institutions NIST
MIT
Alma mater Hope College
University of California, Berkeley
Notable awards Harold E. Edgerton Award (1988)

Baker Memorial Award for Exellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1988)

Young Scholar Award of the American Association of University Women (1988)

Nobel Laureate Signature Award of the American Chemical Society (1993)

MIT School of Science Teaching Prize (1993)

MacVicar Faculty Fellow (1998)

Sylvia T. Ceyer is a professor of chemistry at MIT. She currently holds the John C. Sheehan Chair in Chemistry at MIT. Until 2006 she held the chemistry chair of the National Academy of Sciences.

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[edit] Background

Prof. Ceyer graduated from Hope College in 1974 with an A.B. in chemistry. In 1979, she was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley (her advisors were Y. T. Lee and Gabor Somorjai). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) from 1979 to 1981.

[edit] MIT professor

Prof. Ceyer joined the MIT faculty in 1981. In 1987, she became tenured.

In 2004, MIT was conducting a search for a new president, and she was appointed to the Faculty Advisory Committee to the MIT Corporation. Ultimately, the Corporation chose Susan Hockfield, a neurobiologist from Yale University to be MIT's next president.

The following year, she was appointed associate head of MIT's Chemistry Department.

[edit] Research

Prof. Ceyer is a physical chemist whose main research interests lie in the interactions of molecules onto surfaces. This work is done in an ultra-high vacuum environment, because ambient gasses or liquids will modify the surface under study. This allows unambiguous identification of the reactive species and processes of interest. These surfaces can be templates for nanomechanical devices or catalysts for chemical reactions. The central theme to her work is understanding of the so-called "pressure-gap", the disparity observed between reactions that occur under high pressure and the corresponding lack of reaction observed under ultra-high vacuum conditions.

Her groundbreaking contributions to surface science include discovery of collision induced processes at surfaces, in which an energetic, neutral, noble gas atom impinges on a surface pre-covered with an adsorbate, causing a reaction to occur between the surface and the adsorbate. The reactions observed include dissociation, desorption, and absorption into the bulk of the substrate. In addition, she discovered that electron energy loss spectroscopy can be used to detect species absorbed in the bulk of a substrate, and can be used to differentiate between bulk and surface species. This paved the way for her subsequent discovery that hydrogen atoms absorbed in the bulk of a nickel sample are the key reactant in the hydrogenation of unsaturated hydrocarbons. Another major discovery involved the reaction of fluorine molecules with a silicon surface (a reaction that is key to semiconductor device etching), in which the silicon surface abstracts a fluorine atom from the incident fluorine molecule, and the remaining fluorine atom scatters into the gas phase. This is the reverse of the Eley-Rideal mechanism, one of the fundamental mechanism of gas-surface chemical reactions.

[edit] Awards and honors

Prior to holding the John C. Sheehan Chair in Chemistry, Prof. Ceyer held the Class of 1943 Career Development Chair from 1985-1988 and the W. M. Keck Foundation Professorship in Energy from 1991-1996.

In 1988, she was awarded the Harold E. Edgerton Award, the Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate teaching and the Young Scholar Award from the American Association of University Women. In 1993, Prof Ceyer was given the Nobel Laureate Signature Award from the American Chemical Society and the School of Science Teaching Prize. She was a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 1998.

Prof Ceyer is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held the Langmuir Lectureship of the American Chemical Society and the Welch Foundation Lectureship.

Recently, Prof Ceyer was presented with the Willard Gibbs Award on May 26, 2007. She received this award because of her cutting edge research on heterogeneous catalysis.

[edit] Selected publications

  • Lahr, D. L.; and S. T. Ceyer (2006). "Catalyzed CO Oxidation at 70 K on an Extended Au/Ni Surface Alloy". J. Am. Chem. Soc. 128 (6): 1800–1801. doi:10.1021/ja053866j. 
  • Holt, J. R.; R. C. Hefty, M. R. Tate and S. T. Ceyer (2002). "Comparison of the Interactions of XeF2 and F2 with Si(100)2x1". J. Phys. Chem. B 106 (33): 8399–8406. doi:10.1021/jp020936p. 
  • Ceyer, S. T. (2001). "The Unique Chemistry of Hydrogen Beneath the Surface: Catalytic Hydrogenation of Hydrocarbons". Accts. Chem. Res. 34: 737. doi:10.1021/ar970030f. 
  • Tate, M. R.; D. P. Pullman, Y. L. Li, D. Gosalvez-Blanco, A. A. Tsekouras and S. T. Ceyer (15 March 2000). "Fluorine Atom Abstraction by Si(100): II. Model". J. Chem. Phys. 112 (11): 5190–5204. doi:10.1063/1.481092. 
  • Tate, M. R.; D. B. Gosalvez, D. P. Pullman, A. A. Tsekouras, Y. L. Li, J. J. Yang, K. B. Laughlin, S. C. Eckman, M. F. Bertino and S. T. Ceyer (1999). "Fluorine Atom Abstraction by Si(100): I. Experimental". J. Chem. Phys. 111: 3679. doi:10.1063/1.479677. 
  • Haug, K. L.; T. Bürgi, T. R. Trautman and S. T. Ceyer (1998). "The Distinctive Reactivities of Surface-Bound H and Bulk H for the Catalytic Hydrogenation of Acetylene". J. Am. Chem. Soc. 120: 8885. doi:10.1021/ja9819615. 
  • Li, Y. L.; D. P. Pullman, J. J. Yang, A. A. Tsekouras, D. B. Gosalvez, K. B. Laughlin, Z. Zhang, M. T. Schulberg, D. J. Gladstone, M. McGonigal and S. T. Ceyer (1995). "A New Mechanism for Dissociative Chemisorption: Atom Abstraction from F2 by Si(100)". Phys. Rev. Lett. 74: 2603. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.74.2603. 
  • Johnson, A. D.; K. J. Maynard, S. P. Daley, Q. Y. Yang and S. T. Ceyer (12 Aug 1991). "Hydrogen Embedded in Ni: Production by Incident Atomic Hydrogen and Detection by High Resolution Electron Energy Loss". Phys. Rev. Lett. 67 (7): 927–930. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.67.927. 
  • Beckerle, J. D.; A. D. Johnson, Q. Y. Yang and S. T. Ceyer (1989). "Collision Induced Dissociative Chemisorption of CH4 on Ni(111) by Inert Gas Atoms: The Mechanism for Chemistry with a Hammer". J. Chem. Phys. 91: 5756. doi:10.1063/1.457529. 

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