Victor S. Batista was brought up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and received his Licenciado en Ciencias Quimicas (B. Sc. in Chemistry) degree from the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEyN) de la Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1989. In 1991 he moved to the USA and received his PhD degree in Chemistry from Boston University in 1996, where he also received the Sugata Ray Award in 1995 working under the mentorship of Prof. David F. Coker on the development of theoretical and computational methods to investigate photochemical reaction dynamics in the condensed phase. Following two postodoctoral research programs, working on semiclassical methods with Prof. William H. Miller at the University of California, Berkeley (1997–1999) and coherent-control techniques with Prof. Paul Brumer at the University of Toronto (2000-2001), he joined the Yale faculty as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 2001, where he became Associate Professor of Chemistry in 2005, Full Professor with tenure in 2008 and John Randolph Huffman Professor of Chemistry 2019-22. He was Director of Undergraduate Studies (2008-2010). Since 2022, he is the John Gamble Kirkwood Professor of Chemistry at Yale University.
Batista has received the Innovation Award from Research Corporation (2002), the Hellman Family Junior Faculty Award from Yale University (2002); the Petroleum Research Funds Award G6 from the American Chemical Society (2002); the Career Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (2004); the Nanoscale Exploratory Research Award from NSF (2004); the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2005); an Alfred P. the Sloan Fellowship (2005–2006); co-chairmanship of the 2016 Vibrational Spectroscopy Gordon Conference; the 2016 Baker Lectureship at Cornell University; the 2018 Harrison-MacRae Lectureship at Queen’s University, the 2024 Henry Eyring Theory Lecture at the University of Utah. He has been a Visiting Scholar of Phi Beta Kappa for 2017-2018. He has been awarded a 2022 Fulbright Fellowship. Batista has been a Fulbright Specialist since 2022 and a Faculty Visiting Fellow at the Istituto Di Studi Superiori, Universita de Bologna. Since 2022, Batista has been admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), and since 2023 Batista has become an Elected Member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. He is also a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS PHYS Councilor 2018-Present), American Physical Society, and Biophysical Society.
He has published more than 410 articles in peer reviewed scientific journals (Google Scolar h=81) including the development and application of semiclassical and quantum dynamics methods for studies of photoinduced reaction dynamics, quantum control of excited state dynamics and mechanistic studies of photo- and electro-catalytic processes. He has developed quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics methods and applications to studies of catalytic processes in natural and artificial photosynthetic systems, including water-splitting in photosystem II and heterogenized catalysts on semiconductor and metallic surfaces. He developed methods for simulations of nonlinear optical spectroscopy (SFG) and inverse design methods for design of photosensitizers, rectifiers and catalysts for CO2 reduction and H2 evolution. He published studies of graph theory for the analysis of allosteric mechanisms in visual photoreceptors, olfactory receptors and catalytic enzymatic complexes, including CRISPR-Cas9 and IGPS.