family life and participating in normal childhood activities, such as soccer and ice hockey. The advent of World War II changed everything about Klier’s native land—from government to education and even including the name and borders of his country when the beautiful city of Prague became a part of a German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Prague was bombed numerous times during World War II at the cost of approximately 1,200 lives. At the conclusion of the war, this area was reunified with Slovakia as part of the 1948 Ninth of May Constitution enforced by the Soviet Union, becoming a part of the Eastern Bloc. Even under the difficult conditions described, Klier became known for his contributions to strengthening research into heterogeneous catalysis at the Institute. From 1961 to 1968 he was a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute and was part of a group of young scientists whose significant discoveries were disseminated to the world during a relatively stable time in the country’s governance. Although under the Communist regime of the USSR, some changes in governance brought an easing of tensions that resulted in permission for some scientists at the Academy to visit western universities and international conferences. Despite these changes, however, many travel applications were still routinely rejected by state authorities. Klier’s work during those years concentrated on chemisorption on metal oxides and the factors that directed oxygen exchange reactions on transition metal oxide catalysts, as well as on the exchange and chemisorption properties of transition metal cations in zeolites. His research demonstrated the utility of diffuse reflectance UV/Vis/NIR spectroscopy in providing quantitative information about the state of reactive surface centers. This work opened doors for him to attend an international conference in 1967 where he met Dr. Frederick Fowkes, then the Director of Research at the Sprague Electric Company’s Research Center in North Adams, Massachusetts (and who was also serving as the chairman of the division of colloid and surface chemistry of the American Chemical Society [ACS]). Fowkes would join Lehigh University in the summer of 1968 as the chair of the Department of Chemistry, at which point he invited Klier to come to the university as a Visiting Professor. Klier and his wife Jana and their two small sons, John and Peter, arrived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in that summer of 1968. In Czechoslovakia, the year 1968 also saw the beginnings of a liberalization period known as the Prague Spring when the reformer Alexander Dubček was elected as the First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party on January 5, 1968. Dubček lead a political movement that sought to grant additional rights (including access to media, freedom of speech, and the ability to travel abroad) to the citizens of Page 16 · Lehigh University Through the years, few Lehigh University professors have stood firm and risen above life’s challenges more profoundly than Emeritus Professor Kamil Klier. Born in 1932, Klier grew up in the city of Prague, Czechoslovakia (at the time, a democratic republic sovereign state) enjoying a happy As a young man in 1950, Klier matriculated to Prague’s renowned Charles University where he earned his Diploma in Chemistry in 1954. Interested in gaining more knowledge in his chosen field, he pursued graduate studies at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague (and ultimately at the Institute of Physical Chemistry working under Dr. Rudolf Brdička) from 1954 to 1959. He then spent a year in the UK working with Dr. T. I. Barry as a Fellow at the Wantage Research Laboratories in Oxfordshire--a part of the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE)--which was the main center for atomic energy research and development in the United Kingdom at that time. He returned to Prague to obtain his Ph.D. in Physical Sciences in 1961 from what is now the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. As noted in the Academy’s historical publication, Sixty Years of the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague (1953-2013), “Conditions for research and contact with foreign scientific institutions were rather modest in the fifties. Instrument purchases from abroad was [sic] all but impossible; all necessary mechanical, vacuum, and electronic equipment had to be made in-house. The supply of journals to the library was limited. Foreign travel and conference participation was restricted. Meetings with foreign scientists were largely limited to international conferences held in Czechoslovakia.” EMERITUS PROFESSOR KAMIL KLIER And now you know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the rest of the story
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