Brooks H. Pate received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry and Physics from the University of Virginia. His doctoral research at Princeton University was performed in the field of high-resolution infrared spectroscopy. He was an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Molecular Physics Division at NIST. In 1993, he began his faculty position in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Virginia and in 2004 was named William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry.

Pate’s research is in the field of high-resolution molecular spectroscopy. His work at the University of Virginia first developed infrared-microwave double-resonance techniques to measure unimolecular isomerization rates of molecules through dynamic rotational spectroscopy. In 2006, his group introduced the method of chirped-pulse Fourier transform rotational spectroscopy. Recent work has explored applications of broadband rotational spectroscopy in unimolecular reaction dynamics, the structure of molecules and molecular clusters, astrochemistry, and analytical chemistry.

In 2016, he received OSA’s William F. Meggers Award.