Dr. Murthy S. Gudipati is on the Faculty/Staff of Institute of Physical Sciences and Technology, University of Maryland, College Park. He is also Privatdozent of Physical Chemistry, University of Cologne, Germany. He has been actively engaged in research in the areas of Photophysics, Photochemistry, Energy Transfer, Spectroscopy, Low-Temperature Chemistry, Computational Chemistry and Molecular Clusters. Most recent of his research has been carried out using Synchrotron Radiation in the near VUV region (http://www.bessy.de/).

In addition to his association with the Astrochemistry Laboratory of NASA Ames Research Center, where he is interested in the optical properties of cosmic ices and PAH-nanoclusters, Murthy is also a visiting scientist at SRI International, where he has been working on projects with emphasis on both gas-phase and low-temperature spectroscopy involving multi-laser excitations.

Born and raised in southern India, Dr. Murthy Gudipati received M.Sc. (1981) at the University of Hyderabad, India and Ph.D. (1987) at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. After a 3 years post-doctoral collaboration with Prof. Josef Michl (at Austin, Texas), he joined University of Cologne, Germany in 1990, where he obtained his Habilitation in Physical Chemistry in late 1998.

In the past Murthy Gudipati guided 5 Ph.D. Students and several Undergraduate Students. He authored close to 50 publications and gave over 30 presentations including several invited talks. He is a member of the international organizing committee of the forth-coming International Conference on Low-Temperature Chemistry to be held at Jyväskylä, Finland, 2002. His collaborators span between organic chemists and astrophysicists.