UMaine Professor Honored by American Physical Society
Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — University of Maine Professor of Chemistry Jayendran C. Rasaiah has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).
Rasaiah, who also is a cooperating professor of physics at UMaine, specializes in physical, theoretical and computational chemistry and chemical physics. He was cited by APS for his “pioneering contributions to fundamental electrolyte theory, the thermodynamics of polar fluids, the transport of ions in polar solvents and water through carbon nanotubes, and studies of water in nonpolar cavities.”
The society’s fellowship program recognizes members who make advances in knowledge through original research and publication, or made significant and innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. They also are recognized for contributions to the teaching of physics and for their APS activities. Each year, no more than one-half of 1 percent of the society’s membership is recognized by their peers for fellowship status.
Rasaiah joined the UMaine faculty in 1969. Twice he was a guest scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and in 2000, was a visiting scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 1981, he was a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales and, in previous years, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and Science Research Council Fellow at Oxford University.
His multidisciplinary research interests include theoretical and computer simulation studies of the structure and dynamics of liquids and electrolyte solutions, the thermodynamics of polar fluids, the mobility of ions in solutions and in channels and water permeation of carbon nanotubes and cavities. His early theoretical contributions to electrolyte solutions and polar fluids, done in collaboration with Professors Harold Friedman and George Stell at Stony Brook, are widely cited in textbooks and journals, and used extensively by scientists and engineers working in these fields.
Letters from his peers state that Rasaiah “has sought and solved some of the really substantial problems in the statistical mechanics of electrolyte solutions and more recently in liquids with polar molecules. His work is of very high quality, and has rightly given him an international reputation.”
“There is no question about the importance of Rasaiah’s work; it is very significant and of excellent quality.”
Rasaiah’s studies of ion mobility in water, with graduate student S. Koneshan and Professor Ruth Lynden-Bell, then at Queens University in Belfast U.K, helped explain a long-standing problem on the size and charge dependence of the transport of ions in solution.
His most recent research findings, published in Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy, were done in collaboration with colleague Gerhard Hummer of NIH, postdoctoral Fellow Jerzey P. Noworyta and graduate students (Aparna Waghe, Subramanium Vaitheeswaran and Hao Yin). They used computer simulations to discover how water molecules are transported through partially confined systems, such as carbon nanotubes, and to explore water clusters in nonpolar cavities. He and his students (Vaitheeswaran and Yin) have also used molecular dynamics simulations to study surface wetting and phase transitions of thin films of water between plates in an electric field.
Rasaiah’s research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.