Tom Varberg

DeWitt Wallace Professor of Chemistry

I have been teaching Physical and General Chemistry at Macalester College since 1993. My research is focused on the electronic spectroscopy of metal-containing free radicals in the gas phase, particularly their fine and hyperfine structures. We utilize pulsed and continuous-wave lasers (both dye and Ti:sapphire), often working at very high resolution. We seek to unravel and assign the complicated spectra of these open-shell free radicals, thus deciphering their Hamiltonians and illuminating their electronic structure.  Some of these molecules are of astronomical interest, as this image of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex suggests.

I received my B.A. degree in chemistry in 1985 from Hamline University and my Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from MIT in 1990. I was a postdoctoral scholar at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 1990–92 and a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford from 1992–93. In this training, I explored the spectroscopy of free radicals using a variety of experimental techniques and wavelengths (microwave, far-infrared and visible).

I have had five sabbatical leaves from Macalester College, taken in (1) Boulder, Colorado, (2) Vancouver, British Columbia, (3) Sydney, Australia, (4) Zürich, Switzerland & Florence, Italy, and (5) Cape Town, South Africa, Bologna, Italy & London, England, as well as two research summers spent at the University of Oxford, England.

I take as my professional motto the sentiment expressed by the 19th-century French chemist and statesman Jean-Baptiste Dumas, who once wrote that “the greatest joy of my life has been to accomplish original scientific work, and next to that, to lecture to a group of intelligent students.“ I feel fortunate to be able to do the same here at Macalester College.