Wheland Lecture
The Wheland Medal and Lectureship was created in memory of Chicago physical organic chemist George Wheland. Awarded every other year, previous recipients include Frank H. Westheimer, Harden M. McConnell, Nelson Leonard, Fred Wudl, Roberft L. Baldwin, and Robert Grubbs.
Biography: George W. Wheland (1907-1962) obtained his doctoral degree with J.B. Conant at Harvard University and then moved to Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow (1932-1936) to work with Linus Pauling in the extension of resonance to organic molecules. He co-authored the fifth paper of Pauling's series on "The Nature of the Chemical Bond" and became a staunch advocate of resonance theory. In 1936, Wheland went to the United Kingdom as a Guggenheim Fellow to spend a year at the Department of Chemistry at the University of London headed by Ingold. He also used part of his time to work for some months in Oxford with Cyril Hinshelwood and to visit Lennard-Jones in Cambridge, Sommerfeld in Munich, and Hückel in Stuttgart.
Previous Honorees:
2017: Professor John P. Maier (Basel)
2015: Professor Alanna Schepartz (Yale)
2014: Professor Benjamin Cravatt (Scripps La Jolla)
2013: Professor David Baker
2012: Professor Colin Nuckolls
2011: Professor Carolyn Bertozzi (Stanford)
2010: Professor E.W. Meijer
2009: Professor Stuart Schreiber (Harvard)
2007: Professor George Whitesides (Harvard)
2006: Professor James Barber
2005: Professor Makoto Fujita
2002: Professor Harry Gray (Caltech)
2000: Professor Edward Solomon (Stanford)
1993: Professor Fred Wudl
1992: Professor Robert Grubbs (Caltech)
1991: Professor Leonard Nelson