Alumni Relations
Faculty Highlights
The Bruce Mahan Endowed Chair in Chemistry
A Quiet Scholar
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Bruce Mahan |
He was an excellent scientist, a good man,” said Nobel
laureate Yuan T. Lee of his Ph.D. advisor and former colleague,
Bruce Mahan. Born in 1930, Mahan received his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D.
from Harvard University. His thesis advisor was George Kistiakowsky, who
started the young Mahan in research in gas phase reaction kinetics, which
he would pursue throughout his career.
Mahan joined the Berkeley faculty in 1956. Among his courses
was a new freshman chemistry course described in the catalog as “Lecture
and laboratory for students of superior facility and preparation”—today’s
Chemistry 4. The textbook he wrote for the course, University Chemistry,
was internationally acclaimed and was translated into eight other languages,
including Japanese, Turkish and Greek. The book sold more than half a
million copies and went through four editions.
Although innately shy, Bruce was one of the early winners
of the campus teaching award in 1961; the students admired his deep understanding
of chemistry and respected his demanding, but fair, standards. At the
graduate level, he fostered independence in his students, encouraging
them to take the initiative and plan the next step in their work. Lee,
his best known student, attributed his own success to the way that Bruce
trained his students.
From 1968-71, Mahan chaired the Department of Chemistry
and successfully recruited many of the faculty members who are responsible
for the department’s continued outstanding reputation. He carried his
rigorous but fair standards into his dealings with the faculty as well
as his students.
Bruce’s research focused on molecular collisional processes,
especially collisional energy transfers and ion-molecule reactions, a
field that he pioneered. He was the first to recognize that efficient
energy transfer from excited polyatomic molecules was attributable to
frequent events with a small amount of average energy transfer rather
than to rare events with large amounts of average energy transfer. His
work was recognized with election to the National Academy of Sciences
in 1976.
The previous year, Bruce was diagnosed with amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis (ALS), or “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” an incurable illness
that slowly causes paralysis, starting with the extremities and working
its way to the central organs. In the course of the next four years, he
went from crutches to a wheelchair to bed, and finally to a respirator.
Despite his condition, he remained cheerful, actively directing his graduate
students, revising his textbook, and continuing his research. Always a
man of few words, at the end he could communicate only by his eyes. His
illness forced him to resign in 1980, and he died two years later.
As his faculty colleagues said at the time of his death,
“Once Bruce made a commitment he never wavered. He had the honesty, integrity
and above all the ability to do whatever he said he would do. He would
never quit and he would never give an excuse. He faced ALS as he would
any other challenge. He just kept fighting.”1
Bruce Mahan left one-third of his estate to the chemistry department, where the funds were used in past to establish the Bruce H. Mahan Departmental Teaching Assistant Awards. Now his former colleagues, students and friends have contributed additional funds and have chosen to recognize him by creating the Bruce H. Mahan Endowed Chair in Chemistry. The chair holder is Professor David Chandler—like Bruce, an internationally acclaimed physical chemist.
1 From “Bruce Herbert Mahan” by Yuan T. Lee, Rollie J. Myers, Kenneth Sauer, and Ignacio Tinoco Jr., in In Memoriam 1988, University of California. This publication provided much of the information for the above column.
by Jane Scheiber
