Dr. Richard Smalley, a 1996 Nobel Prize winner and former Hope College student, will speak at Hope on Friday, April 19, at 4 p.m. in room 102 of VanderWerf Hall.
Smalley will present "Buckytubes! New Materials and Devices from Carbon" as the college's annual James and Jeanette Neckers Lectureship in Chemistry. He is the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he also directs the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
Smalley attended Hope from 1961 to 1963 before completing a bachelor of science degree in chemistry at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1965. After working for several years as a research chemist for Shell Chemical Company, he attended Princeton University, where he completed a master of arts degree in 1971 and a doctorate in 1973. He joined the Rice faculty in 1976 as a professor of chemistry, and has also been a member of the physics department since 1990. He was named to his endowed chair in 1982.
He has received several awards and prizes for his research. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1990, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.
The James and Jeanette Neckers Lectureship and Student Assistance Fund through which Smalley is speaking was established in 1984 by Dr. James W. and Jeanette Hoffman Neckers, members of the college's Class of 1923, to support annual lectureships in chemistry. Through additional gifts from Dr. Neckers, the fund has been expanded to include student summer research stipends and student scholarships.
Jeanette Neckers died on June 10, 1992. James Neckers, who lives in Carbondale, Ill,. was chairman of the Department of Chemistry at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale for 37 of his 40 years at the university. Under his leadership, the department grew from a three-year offering in chemistry to granting the doctorate; the faculty grew from three to 23.