Alexander Pines

Alexander Pines was an American chemist, born on June 22, 1945, who grew up in Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He studied undergraduate mathematics and chemistry in Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, came to the United States in 1968, obtained his Ph.D. in chemical physics at M.I.T. in 1972 and joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty later that year. He became the Glenn T. Seaborg Professor Emeritus and Chancellor Professor Emeritus there and a member of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences. Pines was a pioneer in the development and applications of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy of non-liquid samples, demonstrating time-reversal of dipole-dipole couplings in many-body spin systems. He received the Langmuir Medal of the American Chemical Society, the Faraday Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Wolf Prize for Chemistry, and he died on November 1, 2024, at the age of 79.