Sylvia Teresse Ceyer is a professor of chemistry at MIT, holding the John C. Sheehan Chair in Chemistry. Until 2006, she held the chemistry chair of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ceyer joined the MIT faculty in 1981. In 1987, she became tenured. 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, 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.
