Patricia A. Thiel '75, John D. Corbett Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, and Materials Science & Engineering faculty scientist in the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, will present a talk which will provide some highlights of her research, as well as of the career path for which Macalester College provided the foundation. Her research focuses on surfaces. One topic of investigation derives from the fact that any ensemble of small particles or droplets is intrinsically unstable because the ratio of surface-area-to-volume is so high. This is an important issue in nanoscience, and also in many other fields, including metallurgy, geology, and even pharmaceuticals.

Thiel is speaking as part of the Schwartz-Wolsey lectureship, which brings to Macalester outstanding individuals to enrich and extend the curriculum with new topics in chemistry and innovations in research methodology.