THOMAS E. GOMPF was born in Elizabeth, NJ but spent most of his childhood on a farm in Pikesville, MD. He received his BA, MA in Chemistry and PhD in Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University. He enlisted in the Army during World War II and received an honorable discharge in 1946. While at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Gompf met his future wife, Elaine Everett Knorr and they later married in 1950. He spent most of his career as a research chemist for Eastman Kodak Co and was the holder of 10 U.S. patents.
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Gompf Family Professorship in Chemistry
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Established in 2016
Held by Rigoberto Hernandez
RIGOBERTO HERNANDEZ is the Gompf Family Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University and remains as the director of the Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity (OXIDE), a position he has held since 2011. Before coming to Johns Hopkins, he was a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech, and co-director and co-founder of the Center for Computational Molecular Science and Technology. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and mathematics from Princeton University, and a PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Hernandez is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellow Award, a Humboldt Research Fellowship, the ACS Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences, the CCR Diversity Award, and the RCSA Transformative Research and Exceptional Education Award. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, and the American Physical Society. At Georgia Tech, Dr. Hernandez served as the first Blanchard Assistant Professor of Chemistry, the first Goizueta Foundation Junior Rotating Faculty Chair, and a Vasser Woolley Faculty Fellow. His recent board memberships include the National Academies Panel within the Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board, the National Academies Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology, the Telluride Summer Research Conference Board of Directors, the NIH Study Section on Molecular Structure and Function B, the Research Corporation Cottrell Scholars Advisory Committee, (Chair), the DOE Committee of Visitors (Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Bio-sciences), and the American Chemical Society Board of Directors.
Dr. Hernandez’s research area can be broadly classified as the theoretical and computational chemistry of systems far from equilibrium. This includes a focus on microscopic reaction dynamics and their effects on macroscopic chemical reaction rates in arbitrary solvent environments. His current projects involve questions pertaining to the diffusion of mesogens in colloidal suspensions and liquid crystals, the structure and dynamics of assemblies of Janus and other patchy particles, fundamental advances in transition state theory, design principles for sustainable nanotechnologies and the dynamics of protein folding and rearrangement.
Dr.Hernandez’s research programs are currently funded by the National Science Foundation and other agencies. The OXIDE effort is cofunded by the NSF, DOE and NIH.