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Becke, Axel
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Description area
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History
Axel Dieter Becke was born on June 10, 1953 in Esslingen, Germany. He immigrated to Canada, and later graduated with a Bachelor in Science from Queen’s University in 1975. He got his Masters in 1977 and PhD in 1981 (both from McMaster). From 1981-83 he worked as a Killam postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, and then went to teach at Queen’s. He returned to Dalhousie in 2006 to teach, and was made the Killam Chair in Computational Science until 2015. His work focuses on Density Function Theory and computational chemistry. In 2000 he was awarded the Schroedinger Medal from the World Association of Oriented Chemists, and in 2006 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. In 2014, he became the first Canadian to receive the premier award in the field of theoretical chemistry from the American Chemical Society. In 2015 Axel Becke was awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Medal for Science and Engineering – the highest honour in science in Canada, which comes with a $1M prize. He is one of the most widely cited scientists, with two of his papers in the top 25 cited science papers of all time. His work on Density Function Theory has been groundbreaking for chemistry and all aspects of science, and he continues to innovate and progress the field. Becke retired officially in 2015 but still works at Dalhousie in the Department of Chemistry.