MIT professor Ceyer joined the MIT faculty in 1981 as assistant professor, becoming tenured in 1987 and reaching full professor in 1990. In 1994, Ceyer was one of 16 women faculty in the School of Science at MIT who drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, which started a campaign to highlight and challenge gender discrimination at MIT. In 2004, MIT was conducting a search for a new president, and she was appointed to the Faculty Advisory Committee to the MIT Corporation. The Corporation chose
Susan Hockfield, a neurobiologist from
Yale University to be MIT's next president. The following year, she was appointed associate head of MIT's chemistry department. On July 1, 2010, she became head of the chemistry department, saying "It is my goal to further the Department of Chemistry's commitment to outstanding chemical research and education as set by a long line of distinguished department heads and faculty."
Research Ceyer is a physical chemist whose main research interests lie in the interactions of molecules with surfaces. This work is done in an ultra-high vacuum environment, because ambient gasses or liquids would otherwise modify the surface under study. This allows unambiguous identification of the reactive species and processes of interest. These surfaces can be templates for nanomechanical devices or catalysts for chemical reactions. The central theme to her work is understanding of the so-called "pressure-gap", the disparity observed between reactions that occur under high pressure and the corresponding lack of reaction observed under ultra-high vacuum conditions. Her contributions to
surface science include discovery of collision induced processes at surfaces, in which an energetic, neutral, noble gas atom impinges on a surface pre-covered with an adsorbate, causing a reaction to occur between the surface and the adsorbate. The reactions observed include dissociation, desorption, and absorption into the bulk of the substrate. In addition, she discovered that
electron energy loss spectroscopy can be used to detect species absorbed in the bulk of a substrate, and can be used to differentiate between bulk and surface species. This paved the way for her discovery that hydrogen atoms absorbed in the bulk of a nickel sample are the key reactant in the hydrogenation of unsaturated hydrocarbons. Another major discovery involved the reaction of fluorine molecules with a silicon surface (a reaction that is key to semiconductor device etching), in which the silicon surface abstracts a fluorine
atom from the incident fluorine
molecule, and the remaining fluorine atom scatters into the gas phase. This is the reverse of the
Eley-Rideal mechanism, one of the fundamental mechanism of gas-surface chemical reactions.
Honors and awards Prior to holding the John C. Sheehan Chair in Chemistry, Ceyer held the Class of 1943 Career Development Chair from 1985 to 1988 and the
W. M. Keck Foundation Professorship in Energy from 1991 to 1996. In 1988, she was awarded the
Harold E. Edgerton Award, the Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate teaching and the Young Scholar Award from the
American Association of University Women. In 1993, Ceyer was given the Nobel Laureate Signature Award from the
American Chemical Society and the School of Science Teaching Prize. She was a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 1998. Ceyer is a fellow of the
National Academy of Sciences, the
American Physical Society and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held the Langmuir Lectureship of the American Chemical Society and the Welch Foundation Lectureship. She was presented with the
Willard Gibbs Award on May 26, 2007, for her research on heterogeneous catalysis.
Selected publications • • • • • {{cite journal • {{cite journal • • • • • {{cite journal ==References==