Willard appointed to Named Professorship

Professor Adam P. Willard has been selected by the Office of the Provost to hold a Francis Wright Davis Professorship, effective July 1, 2025.

Established in 1974 through a generous gift from prolific inventor Francis W. Davis, the Francis Wright Davis Professorship is awarded to distinguished faculty in honor of Davis’s legacy and dedication to the practical advancement of scientific knowledge.

Willard, who will hold this chair for five years, received his B.S. from the University of Puget Sound in 2003, and his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Following postdoctoral fellowships at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin, he joined the Chemistry faculty in 2013 and earned tenure in 2020. Research in the Willard group uses theory and simulation to explore the role of molecular fluctuation in a variety of chemical phenomena. They are particularly interested in systems for which a mean field approach, i.e., the averaging out of molecular-level detail, fails to reproduce experimental results. This is often a consequence of complex molecular scale behavior such as collectivity, spatial or dynamic heterogeneity, or the coupling of fast and slow time or length scales, which can give rise to interesting and unexpected macroscopic phenomena.