Gabor A. Somorjai
| Gábor A. Somorjai | |
|---|---|
Gabor Somorjai in 2003.
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| Born |
May 4, 1935 Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Budapest University of Technology and Economics |
| Notable work | University of California, Berkeley |
| Awards |
National Medal of Science (2001) Wolf Prize in Chemistry Irving Langmuir Award (2007) |
Gabor A. Somorjai (born May 4, 1935) is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a leading researcher in the field of surface chemistry and catalysis, especially the catalytic effects of metal surfaces. For his contributions to the field, Somorjai won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1998, the Linus Pauling Award in 2000, the National Medal of Science in 2002, the Priestley Medal in 2008, the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Science and the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences in 2013. Most recently, in April 2015, Somorjai was awarded the American Chemical Society's William H. Nichols Medal Award.
Somorjai was born in Budapest in 1935 to Jewish parents. He was saved from the Nazis when his mother sought the assistance of Raoul Wallenberg in 1944 who issued Swedish passports to Somorjai's mother, himself and his sister saving them from the Nazi death camps. While Somorjai's father ended up in the camp system, he was fortunate to survive but many of Somorjai's extended family ended up in the camp system.
He was studying chemical engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 1956. As a participant in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Somorjai left Hungary to go to the US after the Soviet invasion. Along with other Hungarian immigrants, Somorjai enrolled in post-graduate study at Berkeley and obtained his doctorate in 1960. He joined IBM's research staff in Yorktown Heights, New York for a few years but returned to Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1964.
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