Marlow Medal and Prize 2008 Winner
University College London, UK
Awarded for his studies of ions using ZEKE spectroscopy and his development of an experiment to study reactions at very low temperatures.
Professor Stefan Willitsch delivered his lecture associated with his award at a Faraday Division Award Symposium in Oxford on 27 March 2009.
About the Winner
Stefan Willitsch was born in Villach (Austria) in 1975. From 1994-2000, he studied chemistry and interdisciplinary sciences at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich (Switzerland).
After his undergraduate studies he took up a PhD project in the research group of Prof. Frédéric Merkt at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of ETH during which he investigated the high-resolution PFI-ZEKE photoelectron spectroscopy of reactive intermediates such as CH2, NH2 and O3 and the rotationally resolved photoionisation dynamics of polyatomic molecules. For his thesis he was awarded the ETH Medal and the Dimitris N. Chorafas Prize for the best dissertation in the sciences.
In 2004 Stefan Willitsch joined Christ Church and the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory of the University of Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow where in collaboration with Prof. Timothy Softley he developed a new experimental method to study low-temperature chemical reactions between ions and neutral molecules with single-particle sensitivity.
In 2007 he moved to be a lecturer in physical chemistry at University College London. In 2008 he moved to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
