Steve Scheiner

College of Science

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Utah State University Chemistry and biochemistry professor Steve Scheiner has been named the 2010 recipient of the D. Wynne Thorne Career Research Award, USU’s most prestigious faculty research accolade. Scheiner is a computational chemist, who uses quantum mechanics to understand the nature of interactions between molecules. His work is unusually broad, but his focus is hydrogen bonds, a chemical phenomenon fundamental to life itself. For a long time, chemists believed that hydrogen-bonded interactions could be identified by a distinctive “red-shift” of infrared light. Scheiner’s research, however, characterized a unique kind of hydrogen bond contact that emitted a “blue-shift.” His research further identified the origin of the phenomenon and focused on a previously overlooked hydrogen bond interaction, now known as the CH–O interaction. Scheiner received his doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard University in 1976. He held positions at The Ohio State University and Southern Illinois University, Carbondale before coming to Utah State in 2000. At USU, Scheiner served as the head of the Chemistry and Biochemistry for nine years, from 2000 to 2009, while maintaining his active research program. Scheiner’s research publications are prolific, with more than 250 peer-reviewed papers, ranging in disciplines from development of theoretical methodology to applications of quantum chemistry to many different areas of science. Just as important, though, is the rate at which other chemists site his work in their own papers, which rivals leaders in the field at MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard. Scheiner has been awarded more than $3.7 million in research grants, an unusually high amount for computational chemistry. His funders include the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Binational Science Foundation, Army Research Office and IBM. Throughout his research career, Scheiner has mentored numerous undergraduate and high school students, 12 doctoral students and 28 post docs. Scheiner is the second chemist to be selected for the D. Wynne Thorne Career Research Award in as many years.