PULLMAN – WSU professor Kerry W. Hipps has been named a fellow of the American Physical Society.
The APS allows only half of one percent of its members to be named as fellows. With a total membership of about 46,000, about 230 people worldwide are elected as fellows each year. The previous WSU chemistry faculty member elected as an APS fellow was Harold W. Dodgen (retired 1986), for whom the university’s nuclear reactor is named.
“It’s quite an honor, and a lifetime appointment,” Hipps stated. The citation for his fellowship is “for his pioneering and innovative work in tunneling spectroscopy and in STM based orbital mediated tunneling through molecular systems.”
Hipps has been the chairman of the chemistry department at WSU since January 2007. He is also past chair of the materials science program.
Hipps was originally trained at WSU in chemical physics by Glenn Crosby, an emeritus faculty member and winner of multiple awards and prizes. The hybrid field, at the interface of physics and chemistry, led Hipps to a short appointment at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, after which he returned to WSU as an assistant professor in 1979. Hipps became a full professor in 1984.
Read about the AAAS awards here.
