The Department of Chemistry is looking forward to welcoming Klaus Schmidt-Rohr to the faculty this July.

Prof. Schmidt-Rohr is a highly regarded spectroscopist, with a background in both physics and chemistry.  His research is focused on materials and his recent studies have revised our understanding of the structure of Nafion membranes (the proton selective membranes on which most hydrogen fuel cells now depend), the surfaces of nanodiamonds, the molecular bases of bone strength, and the molecular composition of biochar.  Schmidt-Rohr approaches materials primarily through solid state NMR, with a distinctive emphasis on skillful spectral editing.  He has also complimented these experiments with innovative analyses of small angle x-ray scattering data.

Prof. Schmidt-Rohr received his Ph.D. from the University of Mainz in Germany and continued at the Max-Planck Institute in Mainz as a staff scientist. Following postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley, as a fellow of the BASF AG and the German National Science Foundation, he took a faculty position in the Department of Polymer Science & Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  More recently, he has been a Professor of Chemistry at Iowa State University.

Prof. Schmidt-Rohr’s pioneering work has been recognized with prestigious awards, including the Rudolph-Kaiser Prize from the German Physical Society, a Beckman Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the John H. Dillon Medal of the Polymer Division of the American Physical Society, and fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in the American Physical Society.