James M. Mayer

Biosketch

James Moers Mayer (Jim) is the Charlotte Fitch Roberts Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. He was born and raised in Manhattan, in New York City, and started doing research in inorganic chemistry just after high school, at Hunter College (CUNY), with Edwin Abbott. He earned an A.B. from Harvard University, doing research with William Klemperer. He received his PhD in 1982 from the California Institute of Technology for work with John Bercaw. After two years as a visiting scientist in the Central Research and Development Department of the DuPont Company, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington. In 2014, he moved to Yale. He has mentored over a hundred graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and almost that many undergraduates have worked in his laboratories. He was a long-serving associate editor of the journal Inorganic Chemistry. He is a fellow of the American Chemical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the NAS. Among other honors, he was the recipient of the 2018 ACS award in Inorganic Chemistry, the 2019 Frontiers in Chemical Energy Science Award from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion. He has given more than 25 named lectures, including as the Debye, Dow, E. Bright Wilson, and John C. Bailar lecturer.

Research Interests

Prof. Mayer’s research explores fundamental properties of simple chemical reactivity, especially hydrogen-atom transfer and proton-coupled electron transfer. His interests span coordination chemistry, catalysis and electrocatalysis, bioinorganic chemistry, organometallic chemistry, and physical organic chemistry, and increasingly focus on the chemistry of nanoscale materials and interfaces. The principles of proton-coupled redox reactions are being developed and often apply broadly across these fields. Chemical reactions of this type are involved in many biological, industrial, energy, and environmental processes. The current focus on reactivity at solid/liquid interfaces starts from the stoichiometry and thermochemistry of hydrogen and other atoms at the surface (and sometime in the interior) and how these are connected to chemical reactivity.