Stuart A. Rice, UChicago professor who shaped the field of physical chemistry, 1932-2024

Stuart Alan Rice, a longtime professor at the University of Chicago whose pioneering research shaped the field of physical chemistry in the second half of the 20th century, died Dec. 22 at the age of 92.

The Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, Rice was on the UChicago faculty for nearly seven decades. During that time, he made seminal contributions to virtually every area of physical chemistry—from the theory of liquids to molecular spectroscopy to X-ray studies of surfaces—and mentored generations of students.

“In Stuart, I encountered a person with an expansive love of the field of chemistry—a subject in which he always seemed to see things a few layers deeper than anyone else,” said President Paul Alivisatos, who took a course in chemistry with Rice while a UChicago undergraduate. “He was a giant: in intellect, scholarship and as a teacher. He inspired generations, and his loss is not only felt deeply at the University of Chicago but across the whole of the scientific community.”

Unusually for a chemist, Rice worked in both theoretical and experimental chemistry and across a wide range of fields. He delved into the electrical secrets of liquid metals, unraveled the statistical mechanics of fluids, and illuminated the intricate structure and dynamics of molecules clinging to surfaces. His work laid foundations for several of the achievements of modern chemistry and physics, including organic solar cells, LEDs and quantum computing.

For his many breakthroughs, he was awarded the Wolf Prize and the National Medal of Science, among other prestigious honors.

New paradigms

Born in 1932 in the Bronx borough of New York City, Rice cultivated an early interest in science and engineering by disassembling household appliances, and he attended the Bronx High School of Science. He received his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1952, and his Ph.D in chemistry from Harvard University in 1955. He was a Junior Fellow at Harvard before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

Over the course of his career, he would co-author more than 700 papers in an extraordinarily large range of fields.

One of his most influential achievements was in an area known as “active control.” An ultimate goal of chemistry is to be able to directly manipulate molecular reactions; in the 1980s, Rice and colleagues showed that carefully timed and shaped laser pulses could direct chemical reactions to a desired outcome. In effect, this allows the experimentalist to choose a specific quantum state for a molecule—laying the groundwork for methods now used in developing quantum computing technologies, among other applications.

Rice and colleagues also made the first quantum calculations of exciton-exciton annihilation in a molecular solid, and made seminal contributions to the theory of electronic states of molecular solids, polymers and liquids. He was a pioneer in the study of the influence of deterministic classical mechanical chaos on the classical theory of unimolecular reaction rates, and carried out landmark studies of the vibrational state dependence of the radiationless decay of optically excited molecules. Other contributions include the development of theories of melting, of diffusion in crystals, of liquid-vapor interfaces, and studies of the amorphous solid phase of water.

These ideas spawned new areas of discovery; for example, his work on transport of matter and energy in liquids anticipated the contemporary understanding of how those properties are affected by the competition between attractive and repulsive intermolecular interactions, and his work on the electronic properties of molecular crystals led the way to contemporary analyses of solar cell efficiency.

“He is an iconic figure in physical chemistry,” said Steven Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry and a close friend and colleague for decades. “Over and over, he would take on a challenging problem at the forefront of the field and make enormous progress on it. He had exquisite taste in problems.”

Some of Rice's favorite discoveries, he said, were ones that initially met with opposition and even derision from fellow chemists. Many of those predictions were later verified in experiments, sometimes by the skeptics themselves.

“He was willing to ask questions that were unfashionable, or that people thought were already settled, and that would lead him to new directions,” said colleague and collaborator Prof. Aaron Dinner. “He always had a very open attitude and a willingness to try new approaches.”

For half a century Rice was the sole editor of a book series called Advances in Chemical Physics, which had a substantial impact on the field. “Some of the articles which most shaped my thinking during my training were in the Advances, and I’m sure it had a similarly profound effect on multiple generations,” said Dinner, who co-edited the books with Rice starting in 2010.

Colleagues described Rice as a devotee of the classic UChicago style of learning through constant discussion. “If you were going to talk to Stuart, you were going to argue with Stuart; but if you lose an argument with Stuart, you’re still going to learn a lot,” said Donald Levy, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, and a friend and colleague for decades.

A tireless teacher and advisor, Rice mentored 107 doctoral students, who are now serving as researchers, professors and public figures around the world. “His impact on the field is generational. In many ways, it’s unmatched,” said Sibener.

He received the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1970, and published a well-known textbook, Physical Chemistry, with R. Steven Berry and John Ross.

“Everyone who teaches chemistry has Berry, Rice and Ross sitting on their shelf,” said Levy. “Most textbooks come at the material basically the same way; but if you have an understanding of the concepts at a very basic level, you can present it in a novel and deep way—and that’s what they did.”

A leader and inspiration

In addition to his scientific work, Rice served in many leadership and advisory roles—at the University of Chicago and beyond.

He served as director of the University’s Institute for the Study of Metals, which he proposed be renamed the James Franck Institute, from 1962 to 1967. He was the longest-serving dean of the Physical Sciences Division, from 1981 to 1995, during which he led efforts to build the Kersten Physics Teaching Center and an addition to the Accelerator Building and helped establish the Department of Computer Science. He also spent time as chair of the Chemistry Department and as dean of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago; multiple University of Chicago presidents have cited him as inspiration.

Beyond UChicago, Rice served on multiple advisory boards for federal agencies, including the National Science Board; on the boards of governors of Argonne National Laboratory and Tel Aviv University; and on the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

In 1999, he was awarded the National Medal of Science, which cited him “for changing the very nature of modern physical chemistry through his research, teaching and writing, using imaginative approaches to both experiment and theory that have inspired a new generation of scientists.”

A fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, Rice’s accolades also included four medals from the American Chemical Society (the Award in Pure Chemistry, the Baekland Award, the Debye Award, and the Hildebrand Award), the Marlow Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, as well as the Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry and the Wolf Prize.

He co-authored three other books: Polyelectrolyte Solutions with Mitsuru Nagasawa, The Statistical Mechanics of Simple Liquids with Peter Gray, and Optical Control of Molecular Dynamics with Meishan Zhao.

Though Rice officially retired in 2008, he remained active in the department, working with undergraduates and with Prof. Norbert Scherer up until his death. He was a fixture at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club, where for decades he ate lunch every weekday—on the order of 10,000 meals over his UChicago career.

Outside of academic work, he enjoyed collecting antique scientific equipment—including microscopes, sextants, quintants and theodolites—and established a broad collection.

He and his family also established the Marion and Stuart Rice Research Award, which is awarded annually to promote new directions of research in the physical and mathematical sciences at the University of Chicago.

He is survived by his wife, Ruth O’Brien, AB’83, AM’91, to whom he was married for 27 years; as well as his daughter Barbara, son David, and two grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his first wife Marian Coopersmith, a fellow chemistry student to whom he was married for 42 years; and his daughter Janet.