Fred Basolo Medal for Outstanding Research in Inorganic Chemistry: Department of Chemistry

Fred Basolo Medal for Outstanding Research in Inorganic Chemistry

The Fred Basolo Medal was established by former students of Fred Basolo in appreciation for his contributions to inorganic chemistry at Northwestern University. After Fred arrived at Northwestern in 1946, a tradition of weekly inorganic chemistry group meetings started. As a result, the Department became one of the top inorganic chemistry departments in the U.S., a position it retains to this day.

Fred Basolo was born in Coello, Illinois in 1920 and received a B.Ed, at Southern Illinois Normal University. He then went to the University of Illinois where he received a Ph.D. with John C. Bailar, Jr. in 1943. After working on a classified military research project during WWII, he joined the faculty at Northwestern in 1946. In 1980, the University honored him with the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professorship of Chemistry.

Internationally recognized for his original contributions to the syntheses and reaction mechanisms of transition-metal Werner complexes, Basolo did some of the seminal work in the developing fields of organometallic and bioinorganic chemistry. He was also a truly gifted teacher. Many of his former students occupy prominent academic and industrial positions. Basolo influenced students worldwide to study inorganic chemistry and received the 1992 ACS Pimentel Award in Chemical Education. He published 400 scientific publications and four books.

Basolo’s contributions to the profession of Chemistry were equally outstanding. He served as President of the American Chemical Society in 1983 and as Chairman of the Chemistry Section of AAAS in 1979. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences and its chairman in 1976. Some of the many honors received by Basolo include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, foreign membership in the Italian Academy of Sciences Lincei, as well as the ACS Awards for Research and for Service in Inorganic Chemistry. He received the first Joseph Chatt Medal, the 1996 Willard Gibbs Medal, and was the 2001 Priestley Medalist of the ACS. The Fred Basolo Papers are available through the Northwestern University Archives.

Past Basolo Medalists

2023	Paul Alivisatos	University of Chicago
2022	Matthew Rosseinsky	University of Liverpool
2021	Tom O'Halloran	Michigan State
2020	Omar M. Yaghi	University of California, Berkeley
2019	Kim R. Dunbar	Texas A&M University
2018	Edward I. Solomon	Stanford University
2017	Anthony K. Cheetham	University of Cambridge
2016	Susumu Kitagawa	Kyoto University
2015	Clifford Kubiak	University of California, San Diego
2014	Makoto Fujita	University of Tokyo
2013	Marcetta Darensbourg	Texas A&M University
2012	Richard Eisenberg	University of Rochester
2011	Gregory J. Kubas	Los Alamos National Laboratory
2010	Roald Hoffmann	Cornell University, 1981 Nobel Laureate
2009	Peter J. Stang	University of Utah
2008	Robert H. Grubbs	California Institute of Technology, 2005 Nobel Laureate
2007	Richard R. Schrock	Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005 Nobel Laureate
2006	Ivano Bertini	University of Florence, Italy
2005	John E. Bercaw	California Institute of Technology
2004	Malcolm Chisholm	Ohio State University
2003	Daryle Busch	University of Kansas
2002	Stephen J. Lippard	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2001	M. Frederick Hawthorne	University of California, Los Angeles
2000	James P. Collman	Stanford University
1999	Thomas J. Meyer	University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1998	Malcolm Green	University of Oxford, UK
1997	Kenneth N. Raymond	University of California, Berkeley
1996	Richard H. Holm	Harvard University
1995	Lawrence Dahl	University of Wisconsin, Madison
1994	Harry Gray	California Institute of Technology
1993	Jack Halpern	University of Chicago
1992	Henry Taube	Stanford University
1991	Ralph G. Pearson	University of California, Santa Barbara