Emily A. Carter, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been named the recipient of the 2017 Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics of the American Physical Society.

The prize recognizes Carter’s achievements in “the development of rigorous, ab initio methods such as embedding techniques and orbital free density functional theory, and their application to modeling the electronic structure of large systems, including solid materials, and charge transfer phenomena between molecules and surfaces.”

Carter, is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and applied and computational mathematics. Prior to becoming dean on July 1, Carter served as the founding director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

Carter’s research spans the fields of chemistry, physics, applied mathematics and engineering and has included creating quantum mechanical tools for understanding and analyzing the behaviors of large numbers of atoms and electrons in materials. In recent years she has applied her work in areas such as creating effective fuel cells, using sunlight to generate electricity and make liquid fuels from carbon dioxide and water, and investigating lightweight metal alloys for vehicles and fusion reactor walls.

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Langmuir Prize, which includes a $10,000 award, honors Irving Langmuir, who worked for GE from 1909 to 1950 and won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The American Physical Society selects the prize recipient in odd-numbered years, while the American Chemical Society does so in even-numbered years. Carter will receive the award at the American Physical Society meeting in New Orleans on March 13, 2017.