C. (Charles) Austen Angell, 87, a world-renowned Regents Professor of chemistry who plumbed into the behaviors and physical properties of glass-forming liquids, died on March 12, 2021. Angell had been an active faculty member of ASU since 1989.

Angell, commonly referred to as “Austen,” leaves behind a trail of seminal research into liquids and glasses, but he also pioneered topics in the geochemical, biophysical and battery electrolyte spaces. He took what was ubiquitous and made it appear exotic. A good part of his career was devoted to exploring the properties of one of the most abundant substances on Earth — water — and transforming our understanding of it into a strangely beautiful compound capable of extraordinary properties. 

In the hands of Angell, water was pushed to extreme physical limits in order to study its peculiar properties. He stretched it and compressed it, heated it and then super-cooled it, reporting new measured physical quantities and observed physical properties along the way. Much of the work focused on the phase transitions of water, those imperceptibly short periods of time when massive reordering happens at the molecular level. One recent set of experiments proved that water could transition from one liquid state to another liquid state with a lower density due to a different arrangement of hydrogen-bonded molecules moving to stronger bonding, making it a more viscous liquid. All of this happens in the split instant before it crystallizes into ice. The work proved a liquid-liquid phase transition that had only been predicted in computer simulations of water models.

Angell’s work resulted in more than 520 publications, many of which provided novel insights into liquids and glasses that have been highly cited among his peers. Four separate scientific societies gave him their internationally contested awards — the American Ceramic Society Morey award in 1989, the American Chemical Society Hildebrand award in 2004, the Materials Research Society Turnbull award in 2006 and the Electrochemical Society Bredig award 2010.

Angell was elected chair of three prestigious Gordon Conferences. He was especially proud of an “outstanding reviewer” award, given to him by the American Physical Society in 2009 and was honored as the University College London's Bragg lecturer in 2015. More recently, he was honored with the Otto Schott Research Award (2018) and the Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award from the Gothenburg (Sweden) Physics Centre (2019).

Water plays such an essential role in life that everyone recognizes it. But it was Angell’s unique insight and understanding of the substance that exposed its fundamental nature as marked by his discoveries, which will echo across the universe. (Source: ASU News)