— LISTEE'S SPOTLIGHT —

Dr. Lester is a Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley, where he was an active member of faculty for 29 years. He developed an interest in chemistry at a very early age, and attended the University of Chicago on scholarship, earning Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees before completing his Doctor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in 1964. He began his career in 1961 as a physical chemist with the National Bureau of Standards and taught at the University of Wisconsin while serving as Assistant Director of the school’s Theoretical Chemistry Institute during the mid 1960s. Dr. Lester joined the IBM research staff in 1968 and became manager of the company’s molecular interactions group in 1976, departing in 1978 when he was named Director of the National Resource for Computation in Chemistry sited at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 1991 to 1995, Dr. Lester was an Associate Dean in the College of Chemistry at Berkeley. Dr. Lester has been a Senior Fellow of the National Science Foundation and a member of special panels for the National Research Council, Gordon Research Conferences, and the National Medal of Science, among others.