Allen Joseph Bard—a tribute on the occasion of his 80th birthday

Abstract

With this Festschrift issue of the Journal of Solid State Electrochemistry, we bow before Allen Joseph Bard, the outstanding scientist and educator, the great electrochemist, and bright intellectual. We celebrate his 80th birthday which gives an excellent opportunity to express our high esteem to Allen, a superb and innovative researcher on behalf of the community of electrochemists and electroanalytical chemists. Allen Joseph Bard is Hackerman-Welch Regents Chair Professor of chemistry and director of Center for Electrochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. Born on December 18, 1933 in New York City, he started his studies at the City College of New York, and got his summa cum laude B.Sc. degree in chemistry, in 1955. He continued his studies in chemistry at Harvard University, obtained both M.A. in 1956 and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry in 1958, where James J. Lingane, then a leading researcher in the field of electroanalytical chemistry, was his mentor. He started to work at the University of Texas in 1958, and became a professor there in 1967. It is certainly not easy to summarize all the activities and achievements of Professor Bard. This would require a whole book or at least a complete volume of the journal. He is the author of more than 900 research papers, the number of citation of his works is more than 50,000, his Hirsch index is 120. He is 11th in the recent Hirsch index list of all chemists. Those are just the actual numbers in the beginning of the year 2013, because in the last 3 years, his citation number was ca. 3,000 in each year. He also has 24 patents. And Al is still very active, continues to publish papers (e.g., 26 in 2012 alone!), writes, and edits books. The organizers of any conference are happy to invite him to present plenary lectures and research talks since he always attracts a large audience.We had the great pleasure of working with Allen on the Electrochemical Dictionary (Springer) that first appeared in 2008, and the second, revised edition in 2012 enjoying his wise advices, profound knowledge, and meticulous checking of all entries. He wrote excellent books: Chemical Equilibrium, Electrochemical Methods—Fundamental and Application with L.R. Faulkner and Integrated Chemical Systems: A Chemical Approach to Nanotechnology. The ’Bard-Faulkner’ (1980, 2nd edition 2001) is on the bookshelf of practically every electrochemist, and has been used in teaching courses for thousands of graduate students. Prof. Bard edited several book series including Electroanalytical Chemistry, Encyclopedia of the Electrochemistry of Elements, Encyclopedia of Electrochemistry (with M. Stratmann), and a fundamental book: Standard Potentials in Aqueous Solutions (with R. Parsons and J. Jordan). Allen Bard pioneered the development of the scanning electrochemical microscope, which allows for high-resolution chemical imaging of surfaces and the study of chemical G. Inzelt (*) Department of Physical Chemistry, Institute of Chemistry, Eotvos Lorand University, Pazmany Peter setany 1/A, 1117 Budapest, Hungary e-mail: inzeltgy@chem.elte.hu