{"id":2503,"date":"2008-11-21T06:47:51","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T06:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2008\/11\/reactions-daniel-neumark.html"},"modified":"2011-12-20T11:08:57","modified_gmt":"2011-12-20T11:08:57","slug":"reactions_daniel_neumark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2008\/11\/reactions_daniel_neumark.html","title":{"rendered":"Reactions – Daniel Neumark"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. What made you want to be a chemist?<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was a kid, I wasn’t particularly good at baseball or any other sports, so I would hang out in my basement with a chemistry set and play with it. I had a truly outstanding chemistry teacher in high school (Frank Cardulla, who received the 2000 American Chemical Society Conant Award for High School Chemistry Teaching) and in college I had the privilege of taking courses from and doing research with Dudley Herschbach, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.<\/p>\n

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be – and why?<\/em><\/p>\n

I thought seriously about going into medicine, but decided I did not have the appropriate bedside manner. I think most of my friends and colleagues would agree with me.<\/p>\n

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?<\/em><\/p>\n

Many of the world’s major problems such as climate change and the need for renewable energy sources will be solved by chemists. These problems require a fundamental understanding of matter at the molecular level. Chemists have this.<\/p>\n

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with and why?<\/em><\/p>\n

I find Josef Stalin to be the one of the most fascinating historical figures over the last 100 years, but I’m not sure I would want to have dinner with him. Then again, an evening of borscht and vodka might not be so bad.<\/p>\n

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab – and what was it?<\/em><\/p>\n

I was pretty involved in experiments on transition state spectroscopy in my research group when I started at Berkeley in 1986. Once I got multiple projects going and realized the students could run the instruments better than I could, I began distancing myself more from the day-to-day operations. But I still visit my labs on a daily basis and (much to the horror of my students) will turn knobs on occasion.<\/p>\n

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?<\/em><\/p>\n

War and Peace. I’ve always wanted to read it but never had the time. And Beethoven’s 9th on CD.<\/p>\n

Daniel Neumark<\/a> is in the Department of Chemistry<\/a> at the University of California, Berkeley<\/a>, and works on chemical dynamics, spectroscopy, and cluster science, with particular emphasis on using negative ion photodetachment to probe transition states and other transient species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. What made you want to be a chemist?  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reactions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}