The University of West Florida and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition will host world-renowned organic and organometallic chemist professor Dr. John Hartwig on Feb. 23, 2016, for two lectures as part of the William D. Smart Seminar Series in Chemistry.
The opening lecture, “New Modes for Functionalization of Organic Molecules†will be held at UWF in Building 58A, Room 113, from 11 a.m. to noon. The second lecture, “Chemical Catalysis: How to Make Everything†will be held at IHMC from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.
Hartwig received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University, obtained his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley with Dr. Bob Bergman and Dr. Richard Andersen and conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Stephen Lippard. Currently, Hartwig is the Henry Rapoport professor of chemistry at U.C. Berkeley. Well-known for his expertise in cross-coupling chemistry that form arylamines, aryl ethers, aryl sulfides and a-aryl carbonyl compounds, he also wrote the textbook “Organotransition Metal Chemistry: From Bonding to Catalysis.â€
Hartwig has received numerous awards, including an A.C. Cope Scholar Award, the American Chemical Society H.C. Brown Award for Synthetic Methods, the ACS award in Organometallic Chemistry, the Nagoya Gold Medal and the Willard Gibbs Medal. In addition, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.
The William D. Smart Seminar Series in Chemistry was established in 2005 by William “Bill” and Mary Smart. This endowment enables the UWF Department of Chemistry to bring distinguished chemical scientists to campus to present and discuss cutting-edge scientific research as well as issues of interest to an educated public.
For more information about the UWF Department of Chemistry, visit uwf.edu/chemistry.