Veronica Vaida

Veronica Vaida (born August 3, 1950) is a Romanian-Hungarian-American chemist and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is an expert in environmental chemistry and aerosols.

Early life and education Vaida was born in Bucharest. Her parents were Hungarians from Transylvania and met after World War II.

Career In 1977 Vaida became a Xerox postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, working alongside Dudley R. Herschbach and Bill Reinhart on photoreaction dynamics. She collaborated with Kevin Peters and Meredith Applebury at Bell Labs. She was made a member of the faculty at Harvard University in 1978. She moved to the University of Colorado Boulder, where she built her own spectroscopy lab. She identified the excited state of OCIO with Susan Solomon in 1989. After collaborating with Susan Solomon, Vaida recognised that her studies of model compounds could be useful in atmospheric chemistry. Her group went on to study atmospheric ozone, water clusters and polar ice. She divorced Kevin Peters in 1990. She hypothesised that aerosol coagulation and division permitted organics to form a surfactant layer on top of the aerosol and recognised that this was similar to single cell bacteria. In 2007 she was appointed distinguished lecturer at Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer University of Colorado Boulder. In 2018 the Journal of Physical Chemistry A published a tribute to Vaida and her research. 2004 – Fellow of the American Physical Society 2004 – Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2004 – Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 2011 – American Chemical Society E. Bright Wilson Award 2020 – American Chemical Society Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics 2020 – Member of the National Academy of Sciences

Personal life She married Kevin Peters, a colleague in the chemistry department at Harvard University in 1978. They divorced in 1990. In 1993 she met Adrian Tuck, a chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Atmospheric Lab. They married in 1997.