Veronica Vaida (born August 3, 1950) is a Romanian-Hungarian-American chemist and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
[1] Her mother, Elza Katz, survived an Auschwitz concentration camp and her father Vasile Vaida was a political prisoner.
[1] After seeing a US position advertised in 1969, she moved to Brown University, working on detectors for molecular beams.
[1] Her original mentor was Geraldine A. Kenney-Wallace, who left to set up the first ultrafast spectroscopy lab at the University of Toronto.
[3] In 1977 Vaida became a Xerox postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, working alongside Dudley R. Herschbach and Bill Reinhart on photoreaction dynamics.
[6] After collaborating with Susan Solomon, Vaida recognised that her studies of model compounds could be useful in atmospheric chemistry.
[1] Vaida's Ph.D. student, Elizabeth Griffith, found that peptide bonds at the surface of water would be generated nonenzymatically.