Dr. Sharon Hammes-Schiffer

Sharon Hammes-Schiffer is currently the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University. She received her B.A. in Chemistry from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University, followed by two years as a postdoctoral research scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Prior to her current position, her academic career has included faculty positions at the University of Notre Dame, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Yale University. Her group develops both analytical theories and computational methods and applies them to experimentally relevant systems. She has pioneered theories of proton-coupled electron transfer and computational strategies for nuclear-electronic quantum dynamics and quantum chemistry, including the invention of the nuclear-electronic orbital (NEO) approach. She has used these approaches in groundbreaking investigations of quantum mechanical effects in chemical, biological, and interfacial processes, including multiple predictions that were subsequently verified by experiment. She has coauthored over 380 peer-reviewed papers that have been cited more than 28,000 times and has delivered more than 500 invited lectures. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2013), the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (2014), and the American Philosophical Society (2024). She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, and Biophysical Society. She has received the Royal Society Bourke Award (2020), the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry (2021), the Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry (2021), and the Gibbs Medal Award (2021). She is the Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Reviews, the premiere review journal of the American Chemical Society, and has served on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science and the Editorial Board for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.