lit a candle 1h agoRead his self assembled monolayer papers so many times in grad school the pages fell apart. 64 is no age at all.
Their story
T. Randall Lee, known to colleagues and friends as Randy, was an American chemist who spent more than three decades on the faculty of the University of Houston. He held the Cullen Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry and served as Associate Dean for Research in the university's College of Natural…
T. Randall Lee, known to colleagues and friends as Randy, was an American chemist who spent more than three decades on the faculty of the University of Houston. He held the Cullen Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry and served as Associate Dean for Research in the university's College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. His research focused on designing new organic and inorganic materials for technological uses, and he was a long-serving editor of journals published by the American Chemical Society.
Thomas Randall Lee was born on 12 September 1962 and came from Daingerfield, in East Texas. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry, magna cum laude, from Rice University in 1985, where he did undergraduate research with Kenton H. Whitmire. He went on to Harvard University, completing his master's degree in 1990 and his PhD in 1991 under George M. Whitesides. From 1991 to 1993 he was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, working with Robert H. Grubbs.
He began his independent career at the University of Houston in 1993. His group worked on selectively fluorinated organic thin films, complex organic interfaces, biologically active surfaces, nanoparticle growth, biopolymers and conducting polymers, and polymerization catalysts. Much of this work used self-assembled monolayers, including nanoscale fluorocarbon coatings that worked as tiny analogues of Teflon for electronics and biomaterials. He wrote or co-wrote more than 240 peer-reviewed papers. Early honours included a Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award and an NSF CAREER Award, followed by University of Houston awards for research excellence and teaching.
Lee served as Associate Chair of the Department of Chemistry for eight years before taking up the Cullen chair and his post as associate dean. He was an Associate Editor of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces from 2010 and became Deputy Editor of ACS Applied Nano Materials when it launched in 2018. Through that journal he built close ties with Brazil, gave a plenary lecture at the Brazilian Materials Research Society meeting in Santos and championed a special issue for South American authors.
Lee died on 6 October 2026 in a hospital in Texarkana, Texas, at the age of 64. Colleagues remembered him as a generous mentor who shared his knowledge freely and was deeply cherished by his students. ACS Applied Nano Materials announced plans for a commemorative editorial in his honour.
Biography adapted from English Wikipedia: T. Randall Lee (CC BY-SA 4.0); University of Houston faculty profile; ACS Applied Nano Materials editor biography; Horn Family Funeral Home notice; Brazilian Materials Research Soci.
Photos
1T. Randall Lee, University of Houston faculty portrait
by People Forever
