PROF. John F. Hartwig

John Hartwig received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University, obtained his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley with Bob Bergman and Richard Andersen, and conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT with Stephen Lippard.  In 1992, he began his independent career at Yale University and became the Irenée P. DuPont Professor in 2004.  In 2006, he moved to the University of Illinois where he was the Kenneth L. Rinehart Jr. Professor of Chemistry. In 2011, he returned to U.C. Berkley as the Henry Rapoport Professor.

Professor Hartwig’s research focuses on the discovery and understanding of new reactions catalyzed by transition metal complexes. In addition to C-H bond functionalization with main group reagents that is the subject of his lecture, he is well known for contributions to cross-coupling chemistry that form arylamines, aryl ethers, aryl sulfides, and α-aryl carbonyl compounds and authored the textbook “Organotransition Metal Chemistry: From Bonding to Catalysis.”

He has received numerous awards, including an A.C. Cope Scholar Award, the ACS award in Organometallic Chemistry, the American Chemical Socity H.C. Brown Award for Synthetic Methods, the Nagoya Gold Medal, and the Willard Gibbs Medal. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.