V. Ara Apkarian is a Professor of Chemical Physics at UCI and Director of the NSF Center for Chemical Innovation on Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit (2007-present). He holds B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from USC and Northwestern, respectively. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in Cornell, he joined the Chemistry faculty at UCI in 1983. He has served as Department Chair (2004-2007) and as the founding co-Director of the Chemical and Materials Physics (ChaMP) program at UCI (1997-2000). ChaMP continues as a uniquely successful interdisciplinary chemistry/physics graduate program, which has graduated more than 200 Ph.D.s. He is a Fellow of the APS and AAAS, a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, and has been recognized with awards in teaching, service and research, including the Humboldt Prize (1996) and more recently through the ACS Award in Experimental Physical Chemistry (2014). His principle scientific contributions are in photophysics and molecular and quantum dynamics in condensed matter. His work, which combines experiment and theory on a wide range of topics, has appeared in more than 150 peer-reviewed publications. His current research combines ultrafast methods with plasmonics, scan-probe and electron microscopy to interrogate single molecules in real-time and with atomic spatial resolution.
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1980
B.S., University of Southern California, 1976