Morton Kostin is a emeritus faculty in Princeton’s Department of Chemical Engineering, known as the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (or CBE) since 2010. Mort spent his entire faculty career at Princeton, and holds the distinction of longest service by a regular faculty member in the CBE department’s history, having educated literally generations of Princeton students. Born in Chicago in 1936, Mort received his bachelor’s degree from the Cooper Union and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. He joined Princeton as a research associate, later becoming a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow and a visiting lecturer. He was appointed as assistant professor on July 1, 1964, promoted to associate professor in 1968, and promoted to professor in 1976. Mort’s longstanding research interests have been in chemical kinetics, particularly in deriving fundamental equations that underpin the observed rates of chemical reactions. A special interest was in understanding the rates of chemical reactions when the reactants were not near thermal equilibrium, so-called “hot atoms” (or molecules).

Chemical kinetics of non-arrhenius chemical reactions