Hartwig receives ACS Gibbs Award

February 26, 2015

Chemistry professor John Hartwig is the recipient of the 2015 Willard Gibbs Award of the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society.

The purpose of the award is to “publicly recognize eminent chemists who, through years of application and devotion, have brought to the world developments that enable everyone to live more comfortably and to understand this world better.”

The award consists of an eighteen-carat gold medal having, on one side, the bust of Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903), for whom the medal was named. On the reverse side is a laurel wreath and an inscription containing the recipient’s name.

Gibbs was an American mathematical physicist whose work in statistical mechanics laid the basis for the development of physical chemistry as a science. Albert Einstein called him “the greatest mind in American history.” Gibbs’s studies of thermodynamics and discoveries in statistical mechanics paved the way for many of Einstein’s later discoveries.

Hartwig will be the guest of honor at the Gibbs Medal award dinner on May 15 in Chicago. He joins a long list of distinguished College of Chemistry faculty members who have won the medal since 1920:

1920 F. G. Cottrell
1924 Gilbert N. Lewis
1951 William Francis Giauque
1953 Joel H. Hildebrand
1966 Glenn T. Seaborg
1976 Kenneth S. Pitzer
1977 Melvin Calvin
2008 Carolyn R. Bertozzi
2011 Robert G. Bergman