Biosketch

Edward I. Solomon grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, received his Ph.D. at Princeton (with D.S. McClure, 1972) and was a postdoctoral fellow at The Ørsted Institute in Denmark (with C.J. Ballhausen) and at Caltech (with H.B. Gray). He started his career at MIT in late 1975, became a full professor in 1981, and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1982 where he is now the Monroe E. Spaght Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Photon Science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has been a visiting professor in France, Argentina, Japan, China, India and Brazil. He has received ACS National Awards in Inorganic Chemistry, Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry, the Bader Award in Bioinorganic Chemistry, the Ira Remsen Award and the Kosolapoff Medal, the Centenary Medal from the RSC, the Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award and a range of other recognitions. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the ACS and the AAAS.

Research Interests

Professor Solomon's research is in the fields of Physical-Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Theoretical-Inorganic Chemistry. His focus is on spectroscopic elucidation of the electronic structure of transition metal complexes and its contribution to reactivity. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of metal sites involved in electron transfer, copper sites involved in O2 binding, activation and reduction to water, in structure/function correlations over non-heme and heme iron enzymes, in correlations between metalloenzyme and heterogeneous catalysis and in the development of new spectroscopic methods.

Membership Type

Member

Election Year

2005

Primary Section

Section 14: Chemistry

Secondary Section

Section 29: Biophysics and Computational Biology