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:
2024 Kevan Shokat
2024 Abby Doyle
2023 Maksym V. Kovalenko
2022 Omar Y. Yaghi
2020 Kevan Shokat - Postponed
2018 Jack Szostak
2017 John Paul Maier
2017 Christophe Coperet
2016 Alanna Schepartz
2015 Benjamin Cravatt
2013 David Baker
2012 Timothy Swager
2012 Colin Nuckolls
2011 E.W. Meijer
2011 Carolyn Bertozzi
2009 Christopher Walsh
2008 George M. Whitesides
2007 James Barber
2006 Makoto Fujita
2003 Harry Gray
2000 Edward Solomon
1997 Paul Sigler
1995 Robert Baldwin
1994 Fred Wudl
1992 Robert Grubbs
1991 Nelson Leonard
1988 Harden McConnell
1986 Frank Westheimer
1983 Joseph Chatt
1981 John Pople
1978 Frederick Sanger
1976 M. J. S. Dewar