Sylvia T. Ceyer

Infobox_Scientist
name = Sylvia T. Ceyer


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birth_place = Chicago, Illinois
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field = Physical chemist
work_institution = NIST
MIT
alma_mater =Hope College
University of California, Berkeley
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societies = National Academy of Sciences, American Physical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
prizes = Harold E. Edgerton Award (1988)

Baker Memorial Award for Exellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1988)

Young Scholar Award of the American Association of University Women (1988)

Nobel Laureate Signature Award of the American Chemical Society (1993)

MIT School of Science Teaching Prize (1993)

MacVicar Faculty Fellow (1998)
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Sylvia T. Ceyer is a professor of chemistry at MIT. She currently holds the John C. Sheehan Chair in Chemistry at MIT. Until 2006 she held the chemistry chair of the National Academy of Sciences.

Background

Prof. Ceyer graduated from Hope College in 1974 with an A.B. in chemistry. In 1979, she was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley (her advisors were Y. T. Lee and Gabor Somorjai). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) from 1979 to 1981.

MIT professor

Prof. Ceyer joined the MIT faculty in 1981. In 1987, she became tenured.

In 2004, MIT was conducting a search for a new president, and she was appointed to the Faculty Advisory Committee to the MIT Corporation. Ultimately, the Corporation chose Susan Hockfield, a neurobiologist from Yale University to be MIT's next president.

The following year, she was appointed associate head of MIT's Chemistry Department.

Research

Prof. Ceyer is a physical chemist whose main research interests lie in the interactions of molecules onto surfaces. This work is done in an ultra-high vacuum environment, because ambient gasses or liquids will modify the surface under study. This allows unambiguous identification of the reactive species and processes of interest. These surfaces can be templates for nanomechanical devices or catalysts for chemical reactions. The central theme to her work is understanding of the so-called "pressure-gap", the disparity observed between reactions that occur under high pressure and the corresponding lack of reaction observed under ultra-high vacuum conditions.

Her groundbreaking contributions to surface science include discovery of collision induced processes at surfaces, in which an energetic, neutral, noble gas atom impinges on a surface pre-covered with an adsorbate, causing a reaction to occur between the surface and the adsorbate. The reactions observed include dissociation, desorption, and absorption into the bulk of the substrate. In addition, she discovered that electron energy loss spectroscopy can be used to detect species absorbed in the bulk of a substrate, and can be used to differentiate between bulk and surface species. This paved the way for her subsequent discovery that hydrogen atoms absorbed in the bulk of a nickel sample are the key reactant in the hydrogenation of unsaturated hydrocarbons. Another major discovery involved the reaction of fluorine molecules with a silicon surface (a reaction that is key to semiconductor device etching), in which the silicon surface abstracts a fluorine atom from the incident fluorine molecule, and the remaining fluorine atom scatters into the gas phase. This is the reverse of the Eley-Rideal mechanism, one of the fundamental mechanism of gas-surface chemical reactions.

Awards and honors

Prior to holding the John C. Sheehan Chair in Chemistry, Prof. Ceyer held the Class of 1943 Career Development Chair from 1985-1988 and the W. M. Keck Foundation Professorship in Energy from 1991-1996.

In 1988, she was awarded the Harold E. Edgerton Award, the Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate teaching and the Young Scholar Award from the American Association of University Women. In 1993, Prof Ceyer was given the Nobel Laureate Signature Award from the American Chemical Society and the School of Science Teaching Prize. She was a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 1998.

Prof Ceyer is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held the Langmuir Lectureship of the American Chemical Society and the Welch Foundation Lectureship.

Recently, Prof Ceyer was presented with the Willard Gibbs Award on May 26, 2007. She received this award because of her cutting edge research on heterogeneous catalysis.

elected publications

* cite journal
title= Catalyzed CO Oxidation at 70 K on an Extended Au/Ni Surface Alloy
first=D. L.
last=Lahr
coauthors=and S. T. Ceyer
journal=J. Am. Chem. Soc.
volume=128
issue=6
pages=1800–1801
year=2006
doi=10.1021/ja053866j

* cite journal
title=Comparison of the Interactions of XeF₂ and F₂ with Si(100)2x1
first=J. R.
last=Holt
coauthors=R. C. Hefty, M. R. Tate and S. T. Ceyer
journal=J. Phys. Chem. B
volume=106
issue=33
pages=8399–8406
year=2002
doi=10.1021/jp020936p

* cite journal
title=The Unique Chemistry of Hydrogen Beneath the Surface: Catalytic Hydrogenation of Hydrocarbons
first=S. T.
last=Ceyer
journal=Accts. Chem. Res.
volume=34
pages=737
year=2001
doi=10.1021/ar970030f

* cite journal
title=Fluorine Atom Abstraction by Si(100): II. Model
first=M. R.
last=Tate
coauthors=D. P. Pullman, Y. L. Li, D. Gosalvez-Blanco, A. A. Tsekouras and S. T. Ceyer
journal=J. Chem. Phys.
volume=112
issue=11
pages=5190–5204
date=15 March 2000
doi=10.1063/1.481092

* cite journal
title=Fluorine Atom Abstraction by Si(100): I. Experimental
first=M. R.
last=Tate
coauthors=D. B. Gosalvez, D. P. Pullman, A. A. Tsekouras, Y. L. Li, J. J. Yang, K. B. Laughlin, S. C. Eckman, M. F. Bertino and S. T. Ceyer
journal=J. Chem. Phys.
volume=111
pages=3679
year=1999
doi=10.1063/1.479677

* cite journal
title=The Distinctive Reactivities of Surface-Bound H and Bulk H for the Catalytic Hydrogenation of Acetylene
first=K. L.
last=Haug
coauthors=T. Bürgi, T. R. Trautman and S. T. Ceyer
journal=J. Am. Chem. Soc.
volume=120
pages=8885
year=1998
doi=10.1021/ja9819615

* cite journal
title=A New Mechanism for Dissociative Chemisorption: Atom Abstraction from F₂ by Si(100)
first=Y. L.
last=Li
coauthors=D. P. Pullman, J. J. Yang, A. A. Tsekouras, D. B. Gosalvez, K. B. Laughlin, Z. Zhang, M. T. Schulberg, D. J. Gladstone, M. McGonigal and S. T. Ceyer
journal=Phys. Rev. Lett.
volume=74
pages=2603
year=1995
doi=10.1103/PhysRevLett.74.2603

* cite journal
title=The Chemistry of Bulk Hydrogen: Reaction of H Embedded in Ni with Adsorbed CH₃
first=A. D.
last=Johnson
coauthors=S. P. Daley, A. L. Utz and S. T. Ceyer
journal=Science
volume=257
issue=5067
pages=223–225
date=July 1992
url=http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1992Sci...257..223J&db_key=GEN&data_type=HTML&format=&high=4515c998b501435
doi=10.1126/science.257.5067.223
pmid=17794753

* cite journal
title=Hydrogen Embedded in Ni: Production by Incident Atomic Hydrogen and Detection by High Resolution Electron Energy Loss
first=A. D.
last=Johnson
coauthors=K. J. Maynard, S. P. Daley, Q. Y. Yang and S. T. Ceyer
journal=Phys. Rev. Lett.
volume=67
issue=7
pages=927–930
date=12 Aug 1991
doi=10.1103/PhysRevLett.67.927

* cite journal
title=New Mechanisms for Chemistry at Surfaces
first=S. T.
last=Ceyer
journal=Science
volume=249
issue=4965
pages=133–139
date= July 1990
url=http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1990Sci...249..133C
doi=10.1126/science.249.4965.133
pmid=17836965

* cite journal
title=Collision Induced Dissociative Chemisorption of CH₄ on Ni(111) by Inert Gas Atoms: The Mechanism for Chemistry with a Hammer
first=J. D.
last=Beckerle
coauthors=A. D. Johnson, Q. Y. Yang and S. T. Ceyer
journal=J. Chem. Phys.
volume=91
pages=5756
year=1989
doi=10.1063/1.457529

External links

* [http://ceyer.mit.edu/ Sylvia Ceyer's homepage at MIT]
* [http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/www/index.html MIT Chemistry Department homepage]
* [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Chemistry/5-112Fall-2005/VideoLectures/index.htm 5.112 Principles of Chemical Science] video lectures by Profs. Sylvia Ceyer and Christopher Cummins
* [http://www.phoenix-st.com/pres_20030212.html Phoenix S&T, Inc.: Dr. S.T. Ceyer (M.I.T.) and Dr. G.W. Parshall (Science Director of DuPont, retired) to join Science Board of Advisors]