Douglas Henderson

According to the decision of the Scientific Council of the ICMP of NAS of Ukraine from April 29, 2010 the title of Doctor honoris causa is conferred on Douglas Henderson (Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA) for his outstanding contribution to the statistical theory of liquid state of matter, for his role in the development of statistical physics and in the strengthening of scientific ties between the North American and Ukrainian scientists and institutions.

Professor Douglas Henderson belongs to a generation of physicists whose names are associated with the most recent progress in understanding of the liquid state of condensed matter. This progress was originated by the the studies of Kirkwood, followed by Wertheim’s analytical solution of the Percus-Yevick equation for hard spheres and by the extension of this solution to the mean spherical approximation (MSA) for hard spheres with long range interaction by Waisman, Lebowitz, Blum, Stell and many others. These theoretical efforts were supported by an advance in computer simulation techniques that commenced with molecular dynamics and Metropolis Monte Carlo simulations by Alder and Wood. Henderson’s role in this half a century study is marked by early work in the 1960s on the virial expansions of correlation functions, his seminal work with John Barker on a perturbation theory of the liquid state in 1967, his exhaustive studies in the 1970s on prescriptions for the hard-sphere pair radial distribution function, the MSA solution of the Yukawa model, his developments for electrolyte solutions and metal electrodes, as well as his fundamental contribution to the integral equation techniques for inhomogeneous systems. Douglas Henderson is one of the authors of the contact value theorem for the density and charge profiles near the hard wall.

An important milestone in Henderson’s scientific career was his 1999 Joel Hildebrand Award by the American Chemical Society in the Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids sponsored by Exxon Research and Engineering Company and Exxon Chemical Company for “developing, with John Barker, the perturbation theory of liquids, the first successful theory of the liquid state, and for his continued development of the theory of liquids, liquid mixtures, liquid surfaces, and polarizable interfaces leading to significant advances in the theory of electrochemical interfaces and colloidal interactions”. For the past five years, he has utilized simulations to explore the topics related to biological interfaces and inhomogeneous solutions with the same precision and care for which his mathematical approach is known. Douglas Henderson has added simulations of ion channels and cavities in proteins to his range of heterogeneous solution interests. Quite recently Henderson and his colleagues are working to examine the flow of ions through a charged channel with nonequilibrium molecular dynamics, and then examined the origin of ion selectivity in sodium and calcium channels, defining the relative roles of charge neutralization and volume exclusion in the narrow cavities. Nowadays, Henderson is trying to apply similar principles to the cavities associated with the active sites in such enzymes as HIV protease and acetylcholinesterase.

Over the years Douglas Henderson has established a distinguished scientific career, he has been a “named” professor at several universities throughout the world. Douglas Henderson is a member of the New York and Mexican Academies of Sciences, Fellow of the American Physical and American Chemical Societies, Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry in London, and has wrote around 500 papers including review articles, books and separate chapters in books. Among them Physical Chemistry: An Advanced Treatise [15 volumes, Academic Press, New York (1966-75) ] with Henry Eyring and Wilhelm Jost; Theoretical Chemistry: Advances and Perspectives [6 books, Academic Press, New York (1973-81)] with Henry Eyring; Chemical Dynamics [Wiley-Interscience, New York (1971)] with Joseph Hirschfelder; Fundamentals of Inhomogeneous Fluids [Dekker, New York (1992); Stochastic Differential Equations in Science and Engineering, with Peter Plaschko, World Scientific, Singapore (2006).

During many years Douglas Henderson is actively collaborating with scientists from the ICMP. Many of our researchers visited his lab and staying there for various periods of time ranging from weeks to years, published a number of joint papers. This collaboration was established many years ago in late 1989, when Douglas Henderson for the first time visited Lviv. Since then Henderson many times came to Lviv, participating in and/or coorganizing several international scientific meetings, helping the scientists from around the world coming to Lviv and Ukraine, for some of them for the first time. In particular, Henderson was a co-chairman of the CRDF sponsored Workshop on Modern Problems of Soft Matter Theory (2000), NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Ionic Soft Matter (2004). Douglas Henderson is member of Editorial Board of the Condensed Matter Physics journal published by the ICMP.