Richard Zare

Zare is known for his enthusiasm for science and his exploration of new areas of research. He has mentored over 150 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, of whom more than 49 are women or members of minorities. Zare is a strong advocate for women in science, and a fellow of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) as of 2008.

Zare has also worked with NASA and others on astrobiology. He is one of the co-authors of a paper that appeared in Science in 1996, raising the possibility that a meteorite from Mars, ALH84001, contained traces of Martian life. Zare used two-step laser mass spectrometry (L2MS), a technique that is particularly sensitive to organic molecules, to examine samples from the interior of the meteorite. He found that the 4.5-billion-year-old Martian meteorite, discovered in Antarctica, contained polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. This lead researchers to speculate on the presence of fossilized remains from Mars. Other researchers questioned this interpretation, suggesting that the sample might have been contaminated after its arrival on Earth. Considerable controversy resulted, which Zare felt disrupted his ongoing laboratory research. Zare has also worked with NASA on examinations of organic materials obtained from Comet 81P/Wild by the Stardust Spacecraft.

Zare served on the National Science Board (NSB) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1990 to 1996, and was the board's chair from 1994 to 1996. He was a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Analytical Chemistry from 2008–2012. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of other scientific publications, among them Chemistry World, Angewandte Chemie, Central European Journal of Chemistry, Journal of Separation Sciences and the Chinese Journal of Chromatography. Zare served on the Physical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2014 to 2016. He is chairman of the board of directors at Annual Reviews, Inc., and serves on the board of directors of The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

In 1977 Zare accepted a position as a full professor of chemistry at Stanford University, becoming the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science in 1987. He served as chair of the chemistry department from 2005 to 2011.

Zare joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in 1965. From 1966 to 1969, he was jointly appointed in the departments of chemistry, physics and astrophysics at JILA at the University of Colorado Boulder. In 1969 he became a full professor in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. He was named the Higgins Professor of Natural Science at Columbia in 1975.

Zare earned his BA in chemistry and physics in 1961 and his PhD in 1964 in physical and analytical chemistry at Harvard University. As an undergraduate he worked with William Klemperer. Zare moved to the University of California, Berkeley to do PhD work with Dudley Herschbach, then returned 2 years later when Herschbach accepted a position at Harvard. Zare completed his PhD thesis, a theoretical analysis of Molecular fluorescence and photodissociation, with Herschbach at Harvard in 1964.

Richard Neil Zare (born November 19, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio) is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. Throughout his career, Zare has made a considerable impact in physical chemistry and analytical chemistry, particularly through the development of laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) and the study of chemical reactions at the molecular and nanoscale level. LIF is an extremely sensitive technique with applications ranging from analytical chemistry and molecular biology to astrophysics. One of its applications was the sequencing of the human genome.