David Beratan

David N. Beratan (born 1958) is an American chemist and physicist, the R.J. Reynolds Professor of Chemistry at Duke University.

He has secondary appointments in the departments of Physics and Biochemistry.

He is the director of the Center for Synthesizing Quantum Coherence, a NSF Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation.

Beratan received his B.S. in chemistry from Duke University, North Carolina in 1980.

He began his studies in electron transfer theory at California Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1986 working with John Hopfield.

Upon completion of his Ph.D., he was a National Research Council Resident Research Associate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and later a Member of the Technical Staff, and held a concurrent visiting appointment at Caltech’s Beckman Institute.

At JPL, he developed the tunneling pathway model for biological electron transfer (with José Onuchic) and general principles for optimizing the nonlinear response of organic structures (with Joseph W Perry and Seth Marder).

In 1992, he was appointed Associate Professor of Chemistry at University of Pittsburgh, where he was promoted to full professor in 1997.

At Pittsburgh he pioneered studies of DNA electron transfer, developed the foundations of inverse molecular design theory, and developed strategies to assign the absolute stereochemistries of natural products using theoretical calculations (with Peter Wipf) of optical rotations.

In 2001 he was appointed R.J. Reynolds Professor of Chemistry at Duke University, and he served as chair of the chemistry department from 2004 - 2007.

At Duke, his studies have focused on novel electron transfer systems in biology, signatures of quantum coherence in chemistry, host-guest interactions, and inverse molecular design and library design (with Weitao Yang).

Ongoing studies in the Beratan lab target the design of molecular structures and assemblies to capture and convert solar energy, defining mechanisms of multi-electron redox catalysis, mapping charge transfer pathways and mechanisms in extremophiles, designing molecular structures that focus oscillator strength for light absorption, creating functional de novo proteins, enumerating diversity-oriented property-biased molecular libraries, exploring charge transfer over micrometer to centimeter distances in bacterial nanowires and bacterial cables, understanding how exciting molecular vibrations can change electron transport dynamics, and understanding the physical principles that underpin host-guest interactions.

(Publications listed below have been cited more than 200 times)