Public Lecture And Awards Ceremony To Honor UC Santa Cruz Chemist Joseph Bunnett

SANTA CRUZ, CA–The UC Santa Cruz Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry will host the first annual Joseph. F. Bunnett Research Organic Chemistry Lecture at 4 p.m. on Friday, May 4. The lecture, which is supported by an endowment fund of private contributions, is in honor of Professor Emeritus Joseph Bunnett.

This year’s lecture will be given by Claude Bernasconi, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSC. Bernasconi’s talk is titled, "What Every Chemist Should Know about Chemical Reactivity: Lessons Learned from the Study of Proton Transfers." It will take place in the auditorium of the Seymour Center at Long Marine Lab.

The lecture will be followed by a reception, which is free and open to the public. A gala banquet and awards ceremony will begin at 7 p.m.; admission is $25.

Joseph Bunnett is famous both for his esteemed work in the field of organic chemistry and for his dedication to the destruction of chemical weapons. Bunnett chairs the Committee on Chemical Weapons Destruction Technologies of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. He has also served on committees of the National Research Council, the Department of Defense, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He cochaired the Peer Review Committee of the Russian-American Joint Evaluation Program, which assisted Russia in destroying its chemical munitions.

Bunnett’s research interests are in the kinetics, equilibria, and mechanisms of organic reactions. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was founding editor of Accounts of Chemical Research. He was twice a Fulbright Fellow and also earned a Guggenheim Fellowship. Bunnett has served as a visiting lecturer at universities in Asia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and North America. He is an honorary member of the Italian Chemical Society, the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan, and the Argentine Society for Research in Organic Chemistry.

Bernasconi has been a faculty member at UCSC since 1967. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry will present two awards at the gala banquet: the Roche Bioscience Scholarship and the Joseph F. Bunnett Research Prize. The Roche award, funded by the pharmaceutical firm Roche Bioscience in Palo Alto, is for outstanding research in organic synthesis by undergraduate or graduate students. The Bunnett award, funded by private donations to the department, is for outstanding research in organic chemistry by senior undergraduate students.