Paul L. Houston

Paul L. Houston is currently Dean of The College of Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, a job he has held since July 2007. Previously, he was Peter J. W. Debye Professor of Chemistry, at Cornell University. He did undergraduate study at Yale, doctoral work at MIT, and postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley before joining Cornell in 1975. He was Chair of the Cornell Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (1997-2001) and Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (2002-2005). At Cornell, he was a member of the Center for Materials Research, the Kavli Institute for Nanoscale Science, and the Graduate Field of Applied Physics. Dr. Houston has held visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (1982), Columbia University (1986, 1987), the Institute for Molecular Science, Okazaki, Japan (1989), the University of California at Berkeley (2003), and the University of Rome "La Sapienza" (2001, 2006). He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (1979-81) and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar (1980).

He served as a Senior Editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry (1991-97), as Chair of the American Physical Society Division of Laser Chemistry (1997-98), and as a member of the Science and Technology Steering Committee of Brookhaven National Laboratories (1998-2005). Paul Houston has authored or co-authored over 150 publications in the field of physical chemistry and a textbook on chemical kinetics. In 2001 he shared with David W. Chandler the Herbert P. Broida Prize of the American Physical Society for work on product imaging in chemical dynamics. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.