David J. Wales

Summary

David John Wales FRS FRSC[4] (born 1963)[2] is a professor of chemical physics in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.[5]

David Wales

Wales in 2016
Born (1963-09-21) 21 September 1963 (age 60)[2]
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (BA, PhD, ScD)
Known forStone–Wales defect[3]
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisSome theoretical aspects of cluster chemistry (1988)
Doctoral advisorAnthony J. Stone
Other academic advisorsR. Stephen Berry
Website
  • www-wales.ch.cam.ac.uk
  • www.ch.cam.ac.uk/group/wales/

Education edit

Wales was educated at Newport Free Grammar School[2] followed by the University of Cambridge where he was awarded an open scholarship to study at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge[1] receiving his BA degree in 1985. He went on to complete a PhD on cluster chemistry, awarded in 1988[6] for research supervised by Anthony J. Stone. In 2004 he was awarded a ScD degree from Cambridge.[4]

Career and research edit

During 1989, Wales was an English-Speaking Union Lindemann Trust Fellow at the University of Chicago, doing postdoctoral research in collaboration with R. Stephen Berry. He returned to a research fellowship at Downing College, Cambridge in 1990, was a Lloyd's of London Tercentenary Fellow in 1991, and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) from 1991 to 1998.[4] He was appointed a Lecturer in Cambridge in 1998, and Professor of Chemical Physics in 2008.[4]

Wales' research investigates energy landscapes, with applications to chemical biology, spectroscopy, clusters, machine learning, solids and surfaces.[4][7][8][9] Wales is the author of the textbook Energy Landscapes: Applications to Clusters, Biomolecules and Glasses[10][11] and a co-author of Introduction to Cluster Chemistry with Michael Mingos.[12]

His research has been funded by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant in 2010), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).[13]

Awards and honours edit

Wales was awarded the Cambridge University Norrish Prize for Chemistry and the Gonville and Caius College Schuldham Plate in 1985, the Meldola Medal and Prize in 1992 and the Tilden Prize in 2015,[1] both by the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was a Baker Lecturer at Cornell University in 2005, the Inaugural Henry Frank Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007, Distinguished Lecturer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA in 2018, and was awarded a Visiting Miller Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, for 2020. He was the first recipient of the ICReDD Award, commemorating Professor Akira Suzuki, at Hokkaido University in 2020. Wales was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016[4] and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He received a Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2020.

Academic appointments edit

2020 International Chair, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Cote d’Azur. 2017- Chair of the Theory Group, Department of Chemistry, Cambridge University. 2014 Telluride Science Research Centre 30th Anniversary Lecturer. 2013-2018 Institute for Molecular Science, Japan, International Advisory Board. 2012 Chair of Inaugural ESF Energy Landscapes Meeting. 2017 Visiting Professor, Universidad de La Laguna. 2011-2012 Visiting Professor, Université de Lyon. 2006 Visiting Professor, Boston University. 2006 Visiting Professor, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse. 1999 Visiting Professor, Université de Paris-Sud, Orsay. 1999 Visiting Professor, Harvard University.

References edit

  1. ^ a b c Anon (2016). "Tilden Prize 2015 Winner: Professor David Wales". London: Royal Society of Chemistry. Archived from the original on 10 March 2016.
  2. ^ a b c "WALES, Prof. David John". Who's Who. Vol. 2017 (online Oxford University Press ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  3. ^ Stone, A. J.; Wales, D. J. (1986). "Theoretical studies of icosahedral C60 and some related structures". Chemical Physics Letters. 128 (5–6): 501–503. Bibcode:1986CPL...128..501S. doi:10.1016/0009-2614(86)80661-3.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Anon (2016). "Professor David Wales FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 29 April 2016. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)

  5. ^ Anon (2016). "David J. Wales group homepage". Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on 22 April 2016.
  6. ^ Wales, David John (1988). Some theoretical aspects of cluster chemistry. ethos.bl.uk (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge. OCLC 556426622.
  7. ^ Wales, David J.; Doye, Jonathan P. K. (1997). "Global Optimization by Basin-Hopping and the Lowest Energy Structures of Lennard-Jones Clusters Containing up to 110 Atoms". Journal of Physical Chemistry A. 101 (28): 5111–5116. arXiv:cond-mat/9803344. Bibcode:1997JPCA..101.5111W. doi:10.1021/jp970984n. S2CID 28539701.
  8. ^ Wales, D. J.; Scheraga, Harold A. (1999). "Global Optimization of Clusters, Crystals, and Biomolecules". Science. 285 (5432): 1368–1372. doi:10.1126/science.285.5432.1368. PMID 10464088.
  9. ^ Martiniani, Stefano; Schrenk, K. Julian; Stevenson, Jacob D.; Wales, David J.; Frenkel, Daan (2016). "Turning intractable counting into sampling: Computing the configurational entropy of three-dimensional jammed packings". Physical Review E. 93 (1): 012906. arXiv:1509.03964. Bibcode:2016PhRvE..93a2906M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.93.012906. PMID 26871142. S2CID 19878643.
  10. ^ Wales, David J. (2004). Energy Landscapes: Applications to Clusters, Biomolecules and Glasses. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511721724. ISBN 9780511721724. Archived from the original on 25 June 2016.
  11. ^ Heuer, Andreas (2005). "Energy Landscapes. Applications to Clusters, Biomolecules and Glasses. By David J. Wales". Angewandte Chemie International Edition. 44 (12): 1756–1757. doi:10.1002/anie.200485197.
  12. ^ Mingos, D. M. P.; Wales, D. J. (1990). Introduction to cluster chemistry. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0134743059.
  13. ^ Anon (2016). "UK government grants awarded to David John Wales". gtr.rcuk.ac.uk. Swindon: Research Councils UK. Archived from the original on 9 May 2016.