Stuart A. Rice is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. He is a graduate of Brooklyn College, where he received his BS degree in 1952. He earned an AM from Harvard in 1954, followed by a PhD in 1955 under the supervision of Paul Doty. After two years as a Harvard Junior Fellow, he moved to the University of Chicago in 1957. He is both a theoretical and an experimental physical chemist, and has made profound impacts in many areas of research, including liquids, quantum control, surfaces and colloidal systems. He has authored and co-authored more than 300 publications, and has supervised more than 100 PhD students.

Rice received the 1999 National Medal of Science, "for changing the very nature of modern physical chemistry through his research, teaching and writing, using imaginative approaches to both experiment and theory that have inspired a new generation of scientists." He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received numerous awards from scientific societies, including the Baekeland, Debye, and Hildebrand Awards from the American Chemical Society.

In addition to his excellence in research, Rice also has a distinguished record of service. He has served as the director of the James Franck Institute, the chairman of the Department of Chemistry, and the dean of the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He has also served on the Board of Governors of Argonne National Laboratory, and as an editor for Chemical Physics Letters and Advances in Chemical Physics. Together with Stephen Berry and John Ross, he co-authored a series of physical chemistry textbooks that have been widely adopted.