The Stanley Wawzonek Lectureship

Stanley Wawzonek was born in Valley Falls, Rhode Island. He graduated magna cum lauda with a B.S. degree in chemistry from Brown University in 1935. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1939 from the University of Minnesota. In 1940, Dr. Wawzonek received a National Research Council Fellowship and worked under Dr. C.S. Marvel at the University of Illinois. He served as an instructor at Illinois for two additional years before becoming an instructor of organic chemistry at the University of Tennessee in 1943. The following year he became an assistant professor of organic chemistry at The University of Iowa. He was promoted to full professor in 1952, and served as department chairman from 1962 to 1968.

Dr. Wawzonek supervised the research of 56 doctoral degree students and seven master's degree students. He had 196 publications and three patents, one of which was cited by Current Contents in 1984 as a Citation Classic. He received the Iowa Award of the American Chemical Society in 1960, the Midwest Award of the American Chemical Society in 1976 and the Outstanding Achievement Award of the University of Minnesota in 1975. He became a Distinguished Fellow of the Iowa Academy of Science in 1979.

Dr. Wawzonek was also active as an editor and consultant. He served as an Associate Editor of Chemical Reviews from 1960 to 1962 and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Electrochemical Society and Organic Preparation and Procedures International. He was a consultant for Ashland Oil, Inc., the Monsanto Company, and Union Carbide Corporation.

Most Recent Lecturer

Albert I. Meyers was born in New York City on November 22, 1932. He received his bachelors and Ph.D. degrees at New York University in 1954 and 1957, respectively, working under the late Professor J. J. Ritter. His thesis dealt with the Ritter Reaction, which involved the condensation of carbocations with nitriles. In 1957 he joined the Cities Service Oil Co. and in 1958 joined the faculty of Louisiana State University in New Orleans (now called the University of New Orleans). In 1965-1966 he was an NIH Special Fellow at Harvard University where his interest in carbanion chemistry arose. He was promoted to Boyd Professor at LSU in 1969 and then moved to Wayne State University in 1970. In 1972 he joined the faculty of Colorado State University, was appointed University Distinguished Professor in 1986 and the John K. Stille Professor of Chemistry in 1993.

Professor Meyers' research interests have been in developing new synthetic reactions, use of heterocycles of natural products, and asymmetric synthesis

Past Stanley Wawzonek Lecturer's

• 1997. Albert I. Meyer. Colorado State University.
• 1994. Thomas R. Cech. University of Colorado, Boulder.
• 1992. Peter B. Dervan. California Institute of Technology.
• 1991. Paul A. Wender. Stanford University.
• 1990. Duilio Arigoni. ETH, Zurich, Switzerland.
• 1988. Samuel Danishefsky. Columbia University.
• 1987. Alan R. Katrizky. University of Florida.