Bruce Berne, a theoretical chemist and pioneer in molecular dynamics recently received two awards: the Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry for 2001 and the Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids for 2002.

The Hirschfelder Prize is the largest in the field of theoretical chemistry and is awarded annually by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Theoretical Chemistry Institute. It carries a stipend of $10,000. Since its inception it has been given to ten other chemists, among whom three were Nobel Prize winners.

The Hildebrand Award is a national award given by the American Chemical Society to recognize distinguished contributions to the understanding of the chemistry and physics of liquids.

Berne, the Higgins professor of chemistry, is a well-known expert in theoretical chemistry and in computer simulations of chemical events. He was a pioneer in the development of molecular dynamics, the method used to simulate chemical reactions on computers, and was the first to apply the method to simulate molecules in condensed states of matter. He has also made major contributions to the theory of chemical reaction rates and to the study of dynamic processes in clusters, liquids and liquid crystals. He invented major new Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics techniques used in computer simulations. Berne has also made seminal contributions to the theory of time-correlation functions, light scattering, quantum liquids, the design of polarizable force fields for biomolecular modeling and the hydrophobic effect.

Berne earned his B.S. in chemistry from Brooklyn College in 1961 and the Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Chicago in 1964. After a year as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow with Ilya Prigogine at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, he joined the Columbia faculty in 1966.

Earning tenure in 1969, Berne has delivered many named lectures and was Miller Institute Professor at UC Berkeley in 1994. Previous awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1968-70), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972-73), an Alexander von Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award (1992) and the American Chemical Society's National Award in Theoretical Chemistry (1995).

Berne is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has published three books and more than 250 research papers.