Dudley R. Herschbach

Herschbach married an Organic Chemistry Harvard student, Georgene Botyos in 1964. The couple has two daughters, Lisa, who is a chemist and Brenda,who is an attorney. He lives with his wife in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Herschbach and his wife served as the co-Masters of Currier Housefor several years.

Herschbach was born on 18 June, 1932 in San Jose, California. He was the eldest child of Robert and Dorothy Herschbach. His father, Robert Herschbach was initially a building contractor and later became a rabbit breeder.

On his father’s side, he had English and Irish ancestry while on his mother's side he had German, Dutch, and French lineage. He had five younger siblings and the family lived in a rural region of fruit orchards, in the neighbourhood of San Jose.

He had a rather simple upbringing and spent most of his childhood milking a cow, feeding the livestock, or picking fruits. From an early age, he developed an interest in reading but at the same time, involved himself in outdoor activities like scouting, and sports.

At the age of nine, he chanced upon an Astronomy article in National Geography authored by Donald Menzel of the Harvard Observatory, which aroused his curiosity in Science. He spent the next few years making star maps and gazing at the night sky, making observations.

He attended Campbell High School and studied Mathematics and Science. His teacher, John Meischke made the subject Chemistry easier for him to understand. He also played Football in School.

In 1959, Herschbach joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he was initially appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry and two years later, Associate Professor. In his early work, he collaborated with Richard Bernstein, Sheldon Datz, Ned Greene, John Polanyi, John Ross, and Peter Toennies.

At Berkeley, along with graduate students George Kwei and James Norris, he constructed a cross-beam instrument big enough for reactive scattering experiments involving alkali and various molecular partners.

In 1963, he joined the faculty of Harvard as Professor of Chemistry. There, he continued his work on molecular-beam reactive dynamics. He worked with graduate students Sanford Safron and Walter Miller on the reactions of alkali atoms with alkali halides. Away from Harvard, he was a Visiting Professor at Göttingen University in 1963.

In 1967, Yuan T. Lee joined the lab as a postdoctoral student, and together with graduate students Doug MacDonald and Pierre LeBreton, the team began to construct a ‘supermachine’ for studying collisions such as hydrogen and halogen reactions.

He became a Guggenheim Fellow at Freiburg University in 1968, a Visiting Fellow of the Institute of Laboratory Astrophysics in 1969, and a Sherman Fairchild Scholar at the California Institute of Technology in 1976.

Herschbach used an emerging technique—molecular beam scattering to learn about the changes that take place during chemical reactions. He invented the ‘crossed molecular beam technique’which facilitated a thorough, molecule-by-molecule analysis of chemical reactions.

Among other studies, he exhibited that Methane is spontaneously formed in high pressure and high temperature environments such as deep inside the earth. This remarkable finding was suggestive of biogenic hydrocarbon formation.