Our Alumni Supporters
Charles T. Campbell, BS 1975, PhD 1979
I started my studies at UT-Austin as an undergrad chemical engineering major,
completing my BS in 1975. I remember Professor J. J. McKetta scolding me and
my roommate for having long hair, but he was a great positive influence anyway! In
the summer before senior year, I was very lucky to be hired by Professor Mike White
to do research in the chemistry department. Mike quickly infected me with his zeal
for research in surface chemistry, convincing me that it offers the key to solving the
world’s energy and environmental problems (a notion that still provides my main
motivation). I continued working under Mike right through my PhD in Chemistry
at UT-Austin in 1979. He was the greatest inspiration in my life beyond my parents.
What a great educator and person! He challenged everyone to be their best in science,
but more importantly as human beings, and set impossible standards himself as an
ideal role model. While I was a student there, I met many lifelong friends, mostly
contemporaries from White’s group who went on to outstanding careers in chemistry.
We worked hard and played hard, often following a string of 12-15-hour work days
with a trip to the Student Union bar with my pals Bill Rogers (PhD 1979) and Bruce
Koel (PhD 1980). I remember fondly many wonderful lectures by the chemistry
faculty there, exciting group meetings where we discussed research, spring-time walks
across the beautiful campus, lunch-time or sunset runs in the stadium, sometimes to
the sound of the Longhorn marching band practice, trips to Taco Flats for their $1.29
dinners and $1.25 pitchers, free concerts during the root-years of the Austin sound,
“What a great time I had there,
weekend bike rides to Lake Travis and swims in Barton Springs.
and what a superb education UT
After receiving my PhD, I did postdoctoral research in Munich with Gerhard Ertl
provided!”
(2007 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry) and was then a staff scientist at Los Alamos
National Lab. I am now the Lloyd E. and Florence M. West Professor of Chemistry at
the University of Washington. I have received the American Chemical Society’s Arthur
W. Adamson Award (2007) and its Award for Colloid or Surface Chemistry (2001),
an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award and the John Yarwood Award of the
British Vacuum Council and the St. John’s College Visiting Scholarship at Cambridge
University. I am Editor-in-Chief of Surface Science. I study surface science, catalysis and
bioanalytical chemistry, and I co-founded the University of Washington’s Center for
Nanotechnology.
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