Mark A. Ratner (born December 8, 1942) is an American chemist and professor emeritus at Northwestern University whose work focuses on the interplay between molecular structure and molecular properties. He is widely credited as the "father of molecular-scale electronics" thanks to his groundbreaking work with Arieh Aviram in 1974 that first envisioned how electronic circuit elements might be constructed from single molecules and how these circuits might behave.

Education

Ratner graduated from Harvard University with an undergraduate degree in chemistry and obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from Northwestern University.

Academic career

Ratner taught chemistry at New York University from 1970 until 1974. In 1974, he and Arieh Aviram proposed the first unimolecular rectifier, thus becoming pioneers in molecular electronics. During more than 45 years in the chemistry department at Northwestern University, Ratner was the inaugural Lawrence B. Dumas Distinguished University Professor, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in Chemistry, associate and interim dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Co-director of ISEN (Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern), recipient of the Northwestern Alumni Merit Award, and an eleven-time member of the Faculty Teaching Honor Roll. Ratner's major areas of research include nonlinear optical response properties of molecules; electron transfer and molecular electronics; quantum dynamics and relaxation in condensed phase; mean-field models for extended systems, including proteins and molecular assemblies; photonics in nanoscale systems; excitons in molecule-based photovoltaics and hybrid classical/quantum representations. He has published more than 1,000 papers in these fields through international collaborations, particularly in Denmark, Israel and the Netherlands. Ratner is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the National Academy of Sciences. His honors and awards include the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, the Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics, the Willard J. Gibbs Award, the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry, and honorary ScD degrees from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Copenhagen. He also serves on the Governing Board for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Selected works