In recognition of his significant contributions to the chemical sciences and in particular his contributions to femtosecond electron diffraction, CUI spokesperson R. J. Dwayne Miller has been invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Professor Miller is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter.
Credit: MPI für Struktur und Dynamik der Materie
Femtosecond electron diffraction uses ultrabright electron sources to watch atomic motions with full structural details in real time. This technique allows obtaining atomic level movies of structural changes, which provided the first atomic movie of a structural transition. More recently, a 20-year effort culminated in the first full atom-resolved observation of the primary motions directing chemistry and how the enormous number of molecular degrees of freedom distills down to a few key motions. It is this reduction in dimensionality that makes chemistry a transferable concept. The long term goal of this research is to extend these observations to greater levels of complexity to directly observe the structure-function correlation in biological systems – to learn how chemistry was optimized to drive biological functions.
Miller is Fellow of several learned societies. Since 1998, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, since 2000 a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada, and since 2015 a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He received numerous scientific awards, among them the Rutherford Medal in Chemistry (1997), an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (2012), the E. Bright Wilson Award in Spectroscopy of the American Chemical Society (2015), and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize 2016.
The Royal Society of Chemistry, which emerged from the Chemical Society of London founded in 1841, is one of the world’s leading learned societies in the field of chemistry. It has over 50,000 members worldwide and its mission is to advance excellence in the chemical sciences.