This year's Kaufman Memorial Lecture speaker is Prof. Franz M. Geiger, Northwestern University.

Talk Title: Chiral Cloud Chemistry

Abstract: The unmistakable smell of a pine forest is produced by biogenic volatile organic compounds that are called terpenes, most of which are chiral. These compounds eventually make their way into the atmosphere where they are oxidized. This process of oxidation allows the terpenes to interact with atmospheric water vapor and eventually leads to the formation of clouds, which impact the global environment through processes such as rainfall and the reflection of sunlight. In this way, there is a direct connection between trees on the ground and clouds in the skies that is governed by chemistry, yet many of the fundamental scientific details of this connection remain poorly understood. Chirality's role in the atmospheric cloud formation, in particular, remains largely unexplored. This lecture summarizes our recent experimental efforts and findings to close this knowledge gap. 

J. Am. Chem. Soc., 147, 14131-8 (2025), Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, 27, 1704-13 (2025), Rep. Ser. Aerosol. Sci., 271, 242 (2024), J. Am. Chem. Soc., 145, 7780-90 (2023), J. Am. Chem. Soc. 143, 16653-62 (2021), ACS Earth & Space Chemistry, 9, 1740-8, (2019), ACS Central Science, 3, 715-725 (2017).

Speaker Bio: Franz Geiger is currently the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, where he leads major research collaborations that involve experiments and computations to study the special role that surfaces and interfaces play in the world. He is a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). He is the recipient of the 2021 ACS Nobel laureate Signature Award (as preceptor, with Paul Ohno as student), the 2017 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation, and the 2016 Faculty Diversity Award from Northwestern University’s Graduate School. He served as Senior Editor and was appointed to Executive Editor at the Journal of Physical Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (ACS), as chair of the Experimental Physical Chemistry (EXP) subdivision of the ACS Physical Chemistry Division, on the Science Board of the Telluride Science Research Center (TSRC), on the International Advisory Board of the Pacific Conference on Spectroscopy and Dynamics, (PCSD), and on the Chemical Sciences Roundtable of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He was the Ralph Grim Mineralogy Lecturer at the University of Illinois, the “Interdisciplinary Problems in Chemistry and Physics” Lecturer at the University of Maryland, a Baker Lecturer at Cornell University, and the 2025 Kaufman Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Geiger joined the chemistry faculty of Northwestern University in 2001. He is a native of Berlin, Germany, where he received his Vordiplom in chemistry at the Technische Universitaet in 1993. He earned his PhD in 1998 at Georgetown University working with Janice Hicks as a NASA Fellow in Earth Systems Science, and was a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change with Mario Molina at MIT.

See more of Dr. Geiger's research on his lab website: https://geiger-lab.northwestern.edu/