Henry F. Schaefer III

Henry Frederick "Fritz" Schaefer III (born June 8, 1944) is a computational and theoretical chemist. He is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Thomson Reuters H-Index of 121 as of 2020. He is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia. Before becoming professor at Georgia he was professor at University of California, Berkeley and in 2004, he became Professor of Chemistry Emeritus, at UC Berkeley Schaefer is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Royal Society of Chemistry, American Chemical Society, and an honorary fellow of the Chemical Research Society of India, among others. Schaefer is an outspoken Christian. He has described himself as sympathetic to teleological arguments, but primarily a "proponent of Jesus." Schaefer was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was educated in Syracuse, New York; Menlo Park, California; and East Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was awarded a B.S. degree in chemical physics by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966, where he had the opportunity to work with scientists including George Whitesides, John C. Slater, F. Albert Cotton, Richard C. Lord, and Walter R. Thorson. He then received a National Defense Education Act Fellowship which enabled him to earn a Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from Stanford University in 1969. At Stanford he worked with Frank E. Harris on ab initio electronic structure theory and quantum chemistry. For his Ph.D. thesis work, he examined the electronic structure of first-row atoms and the oxygen molecule. He published 12 articles in journals including Physical Review and Physical Review Letters prior to defending his dissertation. Schaefer became an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969, with access to Berkeley's Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600 mainframe computer.