Kenneth B. Eisenthal

Biography

"Ken Eisenthal was born and grew up in New York City. Although he planned to be a premed student when he entered Brooklyn College, the excitement of science, stimulated in large part by two of his chemistry professors, Nicholas Cheronis and Homer Jacobson, convinced him to opt for science. This led to his graduate work at Harvard University where he obtained an MA in Physics and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics. His graduate advisor was Marshall Fixman, and the thesis research topic was protein-protein interactions. After Harvard, he went to UCLA, where he used his NIH postdoctoral fellowship to carry out research with Bill McMillan, using a collective coordinate treatment to calculate the activity coefficients of strong electrolytes, which went well beyond Debye-Huckel results in yielding agreement with experiment up to 1.0 molarities. To advance his knowledge of molecular spectroscopy, he joined the group of Mostafa El-Sayed (UCLA), which was at the forefront in breaking new ground in the spectroscopy of organic molecules. Ken then went for a short period of time to the Aerospace Corporation, where he worked on intermolecular singlet and triplet energy transfer in collaboration with Seymour Siegel, who was a classmate at both Brooklyn College and Harvard. Ken then moved from southern California to northern California, joining the chemical physics group at the IBM Almaden (then in San Jose) Research Division Laboratory. The laser know-how at the IBM lab led to his first laser experiments in collaboration with Warner Peticolas, Klaus Rieckoff, and Mark Dowley, which included the first two-photon spectrum of molecules, a theoretical treatment of two-photon excitation of polycyclic aromatic molecules, application of the theory to their experimental data, and an induced birefringent method to measure"

Research Interest

Experimental Physical, Materials