Julius Jellinek of the U.S.
Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has been elected
a recipient of the prestigious Humboldt Research Award, known also as the Humboldt
Prize, by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany for his extensive
groundbreaking work in physics and chemistry of finite-size systems.
Julius Jellinek, an Argonne scientist, won the Humboldt Prize for physics and chemistry of finite-size systems.
Jellinek is a Senior Scientist in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division
at Argonne and a Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago/Argonne Computation
Institute. He earned a Diploma with Distinction in theoretical physics from
Uzhgorod University, in the former USSR, and a doctorate in chemical physics
from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
After spending three years as a Weizmann Fellow at the University of Chicago,
he joined Argonne in 1986 as an assistant scientist in charge of the theory
component in the Cluster Studies Group and rose to the rank of senior scientist
in 1997. From 2000 to 2005, he served as the group leader of the Cluster Studies
Group.
According to the Humboldt Foundation, this award is conferred on internationally
renowned scientists in recognition of lifetime achievements in research; those
whose fundamental discoveries and new theories or insights have had a significant
impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge
innovations in the future. The nominations must be made by established academics
in Germany.
Jellinek is a world leader in the area of atomic and molecular clusters, the
scientific basis for the field of nanoscale materials. He has made many seminal
contributions to the field by developing new fundamental concepts and theoretical/computational
methodologies and tools of analysis, and applying them to a broad spectrum of
systems and phenomena.
Among his most notable contributions are: Explorations of chemical reactivity
at the nanoscale; investigations of the size-evolution of structural, dynamical
and electronic properties of nanosystems; studies of thermal stability, phases
and phase transitions in finite-size systems; explorations of the intriguing
phenomenon of size-induced transition to metallicity and half-metallicity; novel
analyses of dynamical complexity; development and applications of computational
electron spectroscopy; and others.
His pioneering work on nanoalloys played a central role in the establishment
of this new area of research. The fundamental concepts and methodologies he
has introduced have found applications in other fields as well. He is the editor
of the book Theory of Atomic and Molecular Clusters with a Glimpse at Experiments
(Springer, 1999).
Winners of the Humboldt Research Award also are invited for a period of up
to one year to carry out projects of their own choice in Germany in collaboration
with German specialist colleagues. Jellinek plans to work on fundamental problems
related to nanocatalysis, primarily with scientists at the Fritz Haber Institute,
Berlin, and the Institute of Nanotechnology, University of Karlsruhe.