2011 Myron L. & Muriel S. Bender Distinguished Lectures in Organic Chemistry
SPEAKER: K. N. Houk, University of California, Los Angeles
Schedule:
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
4:00 p.m., TECH LR3
Title: Design of New Enzymes
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
4:00 p.m., TECH LR3
Title: Theory and Modeling of Stereoselective Reactions
Thursday, June 23, 2011
11:00 a.m., TECH LR5
Title: Reactivity and Dynamics of Cycloadditions
Department of Chemistry
Northwestern University
2145 Sheridan Road
Evanston, Illinois U.S.A.
Refreshments will be served at 3:30 p.m.
Speaker’s Biography
K. N. Houk received A.B., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard, working with R. B. Woodward as a graduate student in the area of experimental tests of orbital symmetry selection rules. He taught at Louisiana State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and UCLA since 1986. From 1988-1990, he was Director of the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation. He was Chairman of the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 1991-1994, and became the Saul Winstein Chair in Organic Chemistry in 2009.
In his early career, Houk was a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a von Humboldt Foundation U.S. Senior Scientist Awardee, the Akron ACS Section Awardee, and an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awardee from the ACS. In the 1990s, he was recipient of the ACS James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry, the Schrödinger Medal of the WATOC, the Faculty Research Lecturer at UCLA, the Bruylants Chair from the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, an honorary doctorate (Dr. rer. nat. h. c.) from the University of Essen, Germany and the Tolman Medal winner of the Southern California Section of the ACS. He was an Erskine Fellow in New Zealand, a Lady Davis Fellow at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and a JSPS Fellow in Japan. This century, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences, as a Fellow of the AAAS, WATOC, and the ACS, and the National Academy of Sciences. More recently, he won the ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Arthur C. Cope Award.
Houk has served on the boards of a variety of funding agencies and journals, including NIH Study Sections and the PRF Advisory Board. He was Chair of the Chemistry Section of the AAAS, and is now a Senior Editor of Accounts of Chemical Research. He is Director of the UCLA Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Program and a member of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute and California NanoSystems Institute.
Professor Houk is an authority on theoretical and computational organic chemistry, beginning as an experimental organic chemist and now on the forefront of the application of computation and theory to understand and predict chemical and biological reactivity. He collaborates prodigiously with chemists all over the world. He has published over 800 articles.
