2015 Seaborg Award: Heino Nitsche

Education: Nitsche earned a B.Sc. in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1980, both from the Free University of Berlin.

What his colleagues say: Nitsche “was a big-picture kind of guy,” says Richard Wilson, a chemist at Argonne National Laboratory and one of Nitsche’s former graduate students. “He had broadly scoping research programs. He did nuclear chemistry, radiochemistry, actinide chemistry, and a lot of analytical chemistry as well.”

Nitsche pioneered superheavy element chemistry by working with an international collaboration to create bohrium oxychloride and hassium oxide. Just before he died, he was “giddy” to be in Japan, sitting shifts on a beamline as part of a team that synthesized seaborgium hexacarbonyl, Wilson says.

Nitsche’s research also involved “an imaginative, interdisciplinary program to study radionuclide-bacterial interaction mechanisms involving actinide chemistry, microbiology, and molecular environmental science,” says UC Berkeley chemistry professor Gabor A. Somorjai.

Additionally, Nitsche was passionate about training the next generation of scientists. He was thoughtful about giving his students the advocacy they needed to succeed along with independence and room to fail, Wilson says. Nitsche also rarely spoke at international meetings, instead preferring to have his students present their work, Wilson tells C&EN.