The Janssen Prize is a great honor for my group and me, and underscores the importance of catalysis in changing approaches to the synthesis of organic compounds.
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 a-aryl carbonyl compounds and authored the textbook “Organotransition Metal Chemistry: From
John Hartwig
