ORONO – University of Maine professor of chemistry Jayendran C. Rasaiah has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Rasaiah, who also is a cooperating professor of physics at UM, specializes in physical, theoretical and computational chemistry and chemical physics. He was cited by the society for his “pioneering contributions to fundamental electrolyte theory, the thermodynamics of polar fluids, the transport of ions in polar solvents and water through carbon nanotubes and studies of water in nonpolar cavities.”

The society’s fellowship program recognizes members who make advances in knowledge through original research and publication, or who have made significant and innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. They also are recognized for contributions to the teaching of physics and for their activities in the society. Each year, no more than 1/2 of 1 percent of the society’s membership is recognized by its peers for fellowship status.

Rasaiah joined the UM faculty in 1969. Twice he was a guest scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and in 2000 was a visiting scientist at the National Institutes of Health. In 1981, he was a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales and, in previous years, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and Science Research Council Fellow at Oxford University.

His early theoretical contributions to electrolyte solutions and polar fluids, done in collaboration with professors Harold Friedman and George Stell at Stony Brook, are widely cited in textbooks and journals, and used extensively by scientists and engineers working in those fields.

Letters from his peers state that Rasaiah “has sought and solved some of the really substantial problems in the statistical mechanics of electrolyte solutions and more recently in liquids with polar molecules. His work is of very high quality, and has rightly given him an international reputation. There is no question about the importance of Rasaiah’s work; it is very significant and of excellent quality.”

Rasaiah’s studies of ion mobility in water, with graduate student S. Koneshan and professor Ruth Lynden-Bell, then at Queens University in Belfast, U.K., helped explain a long-standing problem on the size and charge dependence of the transport of ions in solution.

His most recent research findings, published in Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy, were done in collaboration with colleague Gerhard Hummer of National Institutes of Health, postdoctoral fellow Jerzey P. Noworyta and graduate students Aparna Waghe, Subramanium Vaitheeswaran and Hao Yin.

They used computer simulations to discover how water molecules are transported through partially confined systems, such as carbon nanotubes, and to explore water clusters in nonpolar cavities. Rasaiah, Vaitheeswaran and Yin have also used molecular dynamics simulations to study surface wetting and phase transitions of thin films of water between plates in an electric field.