Published 1994 as part of Memoir 61
Copyright © 1994 The American Association of Petroleum Geologists.  All Rights Reserved.
 

Peter J. Ortoleva was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942. He received his B.S. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; he earned his Ph.D. in applied physics at Cornell University, under Professor Mark Nelkin, on the statistical mechanics of simple fluids. Dr. Ortoleva carried out postdoctoral research in theoretical physical chemistry with Professor John Ross at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1975 he joined the physical chemistry faculty at Indiana University, where he is presently Professor of Chemistry and of Geological Sciences. He has received Sloan and Guggenheim awards, is the author of more than 100 scientific publications, and is the author of two monographs and the editor of two conference proceedings.

His main research interests are in the theory of self-organization and other nonlinear phenomena, and in far-from-equilibrium reaction-transport systems. Over the past ten years he has focused on problems in geochemistry, including the physico-chemical dynamics of a sedimentary basin, metamorphic differentiation, zoned crystal growth from magmas and aqueous solutions and reaction fronts. He has developed a number of general reaction-transport codes to simulate these phenomena for academic and industrial research.