Richard Zare

Richard Neil Zare, born November 19, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American chemist who holds the Marguerite Blake Wilbur professorship in natural science at Stanford University. Trained under Dudley Herschbach, he developed laser-induced fluorescence, an extremely sensitive technique for detecting molecules that found use across analytical chemistry, molecular biology, astrophysics, and human genome sequencing, and he has studied how chemical reactions unfold at the molecular and nanoscale level. Over his career he has mentored more than 150 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, including a large number of women and researchers from underrepresented groups, and he is a long standing advocate for women in science.