Curt Franklin Wittig is a professor of chemistry and the holder of the Paul A. Miller Chair in the college of letters, arts, and sciences at the University of Southern California (USC).
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Curt Wittig received his B.S.
His earliest contributions were technological: invention of the continuous carbon monoxide chemical laser in 1969, and development and demonstration of the so-called infrared process of laser isotope separation in the late 1970s.
The latter was acknowledged in 1993 with the Herbert P. Broida Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Chemical Physics (given by the American Physical Society); together they were acknowledged through the Bourke Lectures and Medal in 2000 (given by the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK).
Recent research (including ongoing) addresses issues in amorphous solid water, photophysics in doped superfluid helium nanodroplets, complex photochemistry and photophysics of polyatomic molecules, and theories of particle statistics and geometric phases.