Oxford University chemist John Rowlinson to speak at Cornell on May 1

John Shipley Rowlinson, the Dr. Lee's Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, will be at Cornell University from April 27 through May 4 as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large. On May 1, he will deliver a free and public lecture titled "How Does a Glacier Come Down a Mountain? A Rheological Problem" at 4:30 p.m. in Room D of Goldwin Smith Hall.

"Rowlinson is a world-renowned expert on the properties of liquid mixtures and of liquid interfaces," said Keith Gubbins, the Thomas R. Briggs Professor of Engineering at Cornell. Gubbins, who is hosting Rowlinson's Cornell visit, has collaborated with him on many research projects over the years; several of Rowlinson's Ph.D. students have spent extended periods with Gubbins as postdoctoral workers, and vice-versa.

Rowlinson, who received his own education at Oxford, taught at Manchester and London universities before joining the Oxford faculty in 1974. His books include J.D. van der Waals: On the Continuity of the Gaseous and Liquid States, Molecular Theory of Capillarity and Liquids and Liquid Mixtures, and he has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Physical Chemistry and Chemical Physics Letters. Rowlinson's many awards have included the Hofmann Prize for Chemistry and the Marlow Medal and Prize. He is a Fellow and the physical secretary of the Royal Society.

He last visited Cornell in 1994 as a professor-at-large. In 1988, he was the Mary Upson Professor of Engineering at Cornell.