About Curt Wittig - curtwittig.com

Left: Greenwich Village (2023). Right: Santa Monica (2023). Michele and I met in graduate school at UIUC in the mid-sixties and married in 1968. Without her, I would have succumbed to my demons, a lost soul, stumbling from one misadventure to the next, a life with no purpose and meaning.

It is early 2025 and I am marooned in our home in Santa Monica California dealing with the recovery phase of total knee replacement surgery. This turned out to be more painful and lengthy than expected. What better time than now to revise my website.

My research took a big hit from the pandemic. Students and postdocs could not get visas, the university physical plant went into hiding, gatherings were forbidden, etc. The only thing made easier was no-cost extensions from funding agencies. I finally “threw in the towel.” By late 2023 the labs had been shut down. This marked the end of an era. I had run a highly successful group since 1973. There would be no more graduate students, postdocs, proposals, collaborations, etc. Equipment was abundant and high quality, albeit old. I distributed it to groups inclined to put it to good use. This ended in late 2024. The university disposed of what remained. Time to move on!

In what follows, you will see that I have made significant progress toward a major pedagogical goal. The Notes Project is designed mainly for graduate courses in chemical physics or courses of that ilk. It comprises 5 Parts, currently ~ 1600 pages of downloadable pdf files. The finished product will be ~ 2000 pages.

This website contains information about my professional activities: past, present, and future. This is like my past website formats as well as those of the majority of the professional websites of scientists in my field. The resemblance ends there, however. What follows is not exclusive to professional activities. I think many readers will find some of the “other stuff” more interesting. My life before the age of 20 is a separate story altogether as explained in my autobiography. Snippets from my previous website are given below for context and continuity.

I was born and raised in rough parts of Chicago, brought misery into the lives of my teachers, and caused my parents to age at a quickened rate. Happenstance got me into the University of Illinois at Chicago with a 2.4 / 4 GPA. Things like that used to happen every so often back then. After nearly failing out, I caught fire, moved to Urbana-Champaign, receiving a BS and then the PhD in electrical engineering (EE) in 1970. Postdocs (EE at USC, Physical Chemistry at Cambridge (UK) and Berkeley) were followed by a faculty appointment in 1973 at USC in EE. These were wild times. It is amazing things worked out as well as they did. I reached the rank of Professor in EE, Physics, and Chemistry in 1979. With interest in EE fading, I transferred to the Chemistry and Physics Departments in 1981, settling eventually in Chemistry. My research was and continues to be in Chemical Physics.

I am also interested in theory, the pen and paper kind. I respect large-scale computational work, but I am neither inclined toward, nor skilled at, that type of research. Many of my students found it to their liking and benefited from collaborations with computational groups. Students are taught to take responsibility for their education. It is understood that I am not the ” great master” who micromanages their research. It is all right to make mistakes if one learns from them. The idea is to become as self-reliant and as productive as possible.

My wife and I have enjoyed sabbaticals and shorter periods of time in Boston, Cambridge MA, Oxford, London, Jerusalem, and New York. We encouraged our students to travel, work with focused high intensity, read scientific books, and in general subscribe to an intellectual lifestyle.

This Website

My work is rooted in academic research, with the understanding that research constantly erodes and evolves traditional boundaries, to the chagrin of some and the joy and benefit of others. I should know. After all, I have served in the EE, Physics, and Chemistry Departments. I ran a large group in experimental chemical physics for 45 years, typically 10 – 15 students and postdocs, after which a few machines were shut down and our efforts turned to photoinitiated processes in low temperature amorphous solid water. The idea was to lithographically prepare 2D arrays of gold nanoparticles. They would be coated with NaCl, cooled to a desired temperature, and heated using pulsed laser radiation to create “nanovents.” Effluent into vacuum would be detected using time-of-flight mass spectrometry. With the array, a single laser pulse yielded results from ~ 10⁶ nanoparticles. A single coated nanoparticle is stripped of most of the deposited sample from the nanoparticle, albeit with poor S / N and no possibility of signal averaging. However, with ~ 10⁶ more-or-less identical nanoparticles a single pulse yields excellent results. This all came to a crashing halt with the pandemic.

My previous websites were organized around the past, present, and future, with research, teaching, and service represented in rough proportion to the respective time commitments. In my case research dominated. The future parts of websites often serve as platforms for promises, speculation, and unbridled optimism. The latter is fine if it does not go overboard. Science is hard and without optimism where would we be! In any event, whining is not my idea of a constructive way to spend one’s time.

Nothing in the above is unique. It is part and parcel for academic websites. Even impressive ones eventually get stale and obsolete and need to be updated or rewritten to avoid, or at least lessen, false impressions or looking silly. I have never been one to follow tradition, and besides, my present circumstances demand something different. The centerpiece of the website is the downloads section, notably: The Notes Project. This is the result of a seriously nontrivial effort starting ~ 2014. It is unique.

Professional Preparation

1961-64 University of Illinois at Chicago / Electrical Engineering
1966 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign / Electrical Engineering BS
1970 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign / Electrical Engineering PhD
1970-71 University of Southern California Postdoctoral / Electrical Engineering
1971-72 Cambridge University (England) Postdoctoral / Physical Chemistry
1972-73 University of California at Berkeley Postdoctoral / Physical Chemistry

Appointments

2003 – 2005 Section Head, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
2001 – 2003 Chair, Department of Chemistry
1995 – 2001 Section Head, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
1989 – present Paul A. Miller Professor of Letters, Arts, and Sciences
1983 – present Professor of Chemistry
1981 – 1983 Professor of Physics and Chemistry
1979 – 1981 Professor of Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Chemistry
1977 – 1979 Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics
1973 – 1977 Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering
Spring 2017 Visiting Professor, Applied Physics and Mathematics, Columbia University
Spring 2010 Visiting Professor, Chemistry Department, Columbia University
Spring 2004 Visiting Professor, Chemistry Department, Columbia University
Spring 1995 Visiting Professor, Chemistry Department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Spring 1995 Visiting Professor, Chemistry Department, MIT
Spring 1988 Visiting Professor, Chemistry Department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Spring 1988 Visiting Professor, Chemistry Department, MIT
Spring 1981 Visiting Professor, Chemistry Department, Harvard

Summer 1982 Visiting Professor, Chemistry Department, Oxford
1981 – 2005 Advisory editorial board: Chemical Physics Letters
1990 – 1994 Advisory editorial board: Journal of Chemical Physics
1983 – 1988 Advisory editorial board: Journal of Physical Chemistry

1986 – 1998 Founder and Director, Center for the Study of Fast Transient Processes
1995-2001, 2003-2011, 2016-present Department of Chemistry Executive Committee
2017 – 2020 USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences Committee on Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure (DCAPT)
1998 – 2000 Chair, Personnel Committee on Promotions and Appointments, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences
2002 – 2004 Director, Infrastructure Initiative, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences
2021 – Present Provost Committee on Research Integrity

Miscellaneous

2017 – present Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago: “The Math Conundrum: Staying on the Train,” 2017 talk hosted by President and CEO, Mimi LeClair. Their Literacy Program targets kids beginning at third grade.
2015 The Curt Wittig Graduate Award in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry was established by the USC Department of Chemistry.
2014 Autobiography: Close Calls: Autobiography of an Outlier, 266 pages
2013 Curt Wittig Festschrift, Journal of Physical Chemistry (Festschrift Items)
2009 Keynote Speaker, Gordon Research Conference on Molecular Energy Transfer
2007 Lecture Series (one week), Regensburg, Germany, Host: Hartmut Yersin
2005 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
2005 Eminent Scholar Lecturer, University of Arizona
2003 Raubenheimer Outstanding Faculty Award: Teaching, Research and Service
2000 Recipient of the Bourke Medal, Royal Society of Chemistry
2000 Bourke Lecturer: University of Birmingham, University of Edinburgh, University of Leeds
1999 Phi Lambda Epsilon Otto M. Smith Lecturer, Oklahoma State University
1994 Visiting Professor of the National Science Council of Taiwan
1993 Herbert P. Broida Prize, Atomic, Molecular and Chemical Physics, APS
1993 Broida Prize Lecture, University of Missouri, Department of Physics
1992 Outstanding Achievement Award, Army Science Conference
1991 Blacet Lecturer, UCLA
1991 ACS Symposium on Photochemistry of Weakly Bound Complexes, Organizer
1991 Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Illinois (UIUC) (1991)
1988 Reilly Lecturer, Notre Dame University
1988 17th Informal Photochemistry Conference, Organizer, with Hanna Reisler
1986-1990 Western Spectroscopy Association Executive Committee
1986-1990 NAS Committee on AMO Sciences
1983 USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship
1982 Gordon Conference on Nonlinear Optics, Organizer, with David Auston, Albert Lauberau, and Robert Fisher
1981 Exxon Education Foundation Award
1981 Distinguished Visitor (~ 6 weeks): IBM Yorktown Heights Research Laboratories
1980 Halliburton Award for Distinguished Research, USC
1980 American Physical Society, Fellow
1977 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK)
1970 University of Illinois (UIUC), University wide competition for best PhD thesis, 2nd place