Frank O. Ellison
Frank O. Ellison, emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, died in Brighton, Michigan, from complications from Alzheimer’s on 12 January 2018. He was 91 years old.
Born on 18 June 1926 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, Frank attended Creighton University immediately after graduating from high school. He was drafted in November 1944 and served in Germany as part of the army occupation. In September 1945 he was accepted at Weihenstephan Agricultural and Technical School in Freising, Germany, operated by the 20th Corps, where he became an instructor of College Chemistry Laboratory. He returned to the states for discharge in August 1946.
Frank returned to Creighton and earned a BS in chemistry with minors in philosophy and mathematics. In 1949 he began graduate study at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). He was the first graduate student under Harrison Shull, who was the last graduate student under G. N. Lewis at the University of California at Berkeley. Frank originally worked in spectroscopy and then in theoretical chemistry and physics. His thesis, “A Theoretical Study of the Electronic Structure of Water,” was the first complete quantum-mechanical calculation of a 10-electron system. He received his PhD in 1953.
Frank then secured a one-year assignment as lecturer in the chemistry department at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now called Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh. In 1954 he was promoted to assistant professor. In 1965 he moved to the chemistry department of the University of Pittsburgh as associate professor; he was promoted to professor in 1967.
One of Frank’s major achievements was development and application of “diatomics-in-molecules theory.” Using basic valence bond (VB) theory, he was able to show how to express the predicted energy of a polyatomic molecule in terms of experimental energies of ground and excited states of all atoms and diatomic (bonded and nonbonded) components of the polyatomic. Results using limited VB structures were remarkably close to experimental polyatomic energies. He was the first to prove that vibrational and rotational spectral intensities for charged molecules (e.g., H2O+) are often much greater than for neutral molecules (e.g., H2O). He also derived exact equations for photoionization cross sections in the plane-wave and orthogonalized plane-wave approximations. He developed theoretical models for calculating and interpreting intensities of x-ray photoelectron spectra (often referred to as ESCA, electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis). Frank had 69 publications, including part authorship of a book in which he was the first to calculate extremely high temperature vibrational contributions to thermodynamic properties of diatomic molecules by including continuum contributions.
Frank was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, New York Academy of Sciences, American Institute of Chemistry, and Sigma Xi.
While at Carnegie Tech, Frank met and married Jody Lowe, who at the time was an assistant professor in the science department at Margaret Morrison College (the women’s college of Carnegie Tech). Together they raised two children. Frank was active in his community, serving as an elected member of the Churchill Borough Council from 1982 to 1997. After retirement in 1988, he researched his Swedish genealogy, tracing his family back to the 1400s. Frank and Jody moved to Brighton, Michigan, in 2004.
Frank is survived by his son Jim (Tracy) Ellison, daughter Kathe (Charles) James, and four grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife Jody, who died in 2008 of ALS.
