AROUND THE QUADS
5 Minutes with … James Valentini
James Valentini chairs the chemistry department. He earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1976 and trained with two Nobel-Prize winning chemists. CCT caught up with him in April to find out more.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: Lafferty, Ohio, a little town on the edge of Appalachia — near the Ohio River and the border of West Virginia.
Q: What did you want to be when you grew up?
A: The town where I grew up was very small, a population of about 200, quite remote and pretty backward. Most of the work was in the coal mines or on a few farms. There was really no one I knew who had gone to college, except the nuns and priests who taught at my elementary school. There weren’t many career models.
Q: How did you get interested in chemistry?
A: At first I was very interested in things that were precise, and I liked mechanical things, cars especially. I wanted to be in engineering. My chemistry teacher showed me that it was really fun asking how things in nature worked and in doing experiments to answer those questions. I liked chemistry and physics — the work I do is a mixture of both.
Q: How did you end up at Columbia?
A: It’s a quite long path. From the University of Pittsburgh, where I was an undergrad, to the University of Chicago for graduate study, which I completed at UC Berkeley when my research adviser moved there, then a post-doc at Harvard, followed by several years at Los Alamos Labs where I was a research fellow and later a staff member and group leader. Then I took a faculty position at UC Irvine, from which I went to Columbia in 1991. I’ve lived in every time zone and nine different area codes. I have a great collection of auto license plates.
Q: What classes are you teaching?
A: I’m not teaching right now because I am chair of the department and, temporarily, director of undergraduate studies, which together is more than a full-time job.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My research interests are in chemical reaction dynamics. It’s a field in which people try to understand the process of reaction in terms of the motions of all the atoms involved as they respond to the forces between them that drive the reaction. It is a combination of laboratory and computational work. It uses the language and concepts of physics to describe a chemical process.
Q: Are you married? Do you have kids?
A: Yes, I’m married to the former, and future, chair of the Italian department, Teodolinda Barolini. Between us, we have three sons.
Q: How did you meet your wife?
A: I met her when we both were elected to the executive committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences 13 years ago. I saw her at the first meeting and thought she was cute. I still think that.
Q: Where do you live?
A: We have an apartment on Riverside Drive and a house in New Jersey.
Q: You are known to some for your role in a YouTube video, staged by the campus dramatic group Prangstrup. How does that feel?
A: It seems that just about every week someone sends me an e-mail that says “Hey, you’re famous, you’re on YouTube” — people I haven’t seen in years. To my oldest son, a junior at the University of Chicago, it is the most impressive thing I have
ever been involved in. [The video is at www.youtube.com/
watch?v=3SwhzFsuvQc.]
Q: What are you reading for pleasure now?
A: It doesn’t sound like “pleasure” reading, but it is a book about the Black Plague: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly. Nature is not always beneficent.
Q: If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?
A: Bahrain — the
Formula One race is there this Sunday.
Q: What’s your favorite food?
A: There’s only one food that matters to me: chocolate.
Interview: Rose Kernochan ’82 Barnard
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