Allen J. Bard, Professor, Norman Hackerman-Welch Regents Chair, and Director of the Center for Electrochemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, has been called a “father of modern electrochemistry” for his work developing scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM), his co-discovery of electrogenerated chemiluminescence, his important contributions to understanding photoelectrochemistry, and his co-authorship of the influential and widely used textbook, Electrochemical Methods: Fundamentals and Applications.
Dr. Bard attended The City College of New York (B.S., 1955) and Harvard University (M.A., 1956, Ph.D., 1958). He joined the Chemistry faculty at The University of Texas at Austin in 1958, and has spent his entire career there. Dr. Bard spent a sabbatical in the CNRS lab of Jean-Michel Savéant in Paris in 1973 and a semester in 1977 at the California Institute of Technology, where he was a Sherman Mills Fairchild Scholar. He was also a Baker lecturer at Cornell University in the spring of 1987 and the Robert Burns Woodward visiting professor at Harvard University in 1988. He was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the Weizmann Institute of Science.
He has worked as mentor and collaborator with over 100 graduate students, about 200 postdoctoral associates, and numerous visiting scientists. He has published over 960 peer-reviewed research papers and 75 book chapters, and has received over 23 patents. He has authored three books, Chemical Equilibrium (1966), Electrochemical Methods: Fundamentals and Applications (1980, 2nd Ed., 2001, with L. R. Faulkner), and Integrated Chemical Systems: A Chemical Approach to Nanotechnology (1994). He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Chemical Society 1982–2001. His research interests involve the application of electrochemical methods to the study of chemical problems.
Dr. Bard has been awarded many of the most prestigious honors for scientific achievement in his field, including election to the National Academy of Sciences (1982), the Olin-Palladium Medal of The Electrochemical Society (1987), the Priestley Medal from the American Chemical Society (2002), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2008), the National Medal of Science (2011), the Enrico Fermi Award from the U.S. Dept. of Energy (2013), and the Torbern Bergman Medal from the Swedish Chemical Society (2014). The Electrochemical Society established the Allen J. Bard Award in 2013 to recognize distinguished contributions to the field of electrochemistry.
