Alan Katritzky, Ph.D. |
Dr. Alan R. Katritzky carried out both his undergraduate and graduate
studies at Oxford University, U.K.,where he also started his independent research. After
five years at Cambridge as Demonstrator, Lecturer and a Founder Fellow of Churchill
College, he became in 1963 the founding Dean of the School of Chemical Sciences at the
University of East Anglia. In 1980 he crossed the Atlantic to become the Kenan Professor
of Chemistry at the University of Florida and since 1985 as Director of the Institute for
Heterocyclic Compounds. From the start of his career, he has been closely concerned with
heterocyclic chemistry, writing (with JM Lagowski) in 1961 the first modern textbook on
the subject (which was later translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish,
Russian and Spanish) and having edited since its inception in 1963 the series Advances
in Heterocyclic Chemistry, of which Volume 75 has just appeared. He was Chairman of
the Editorial Board for Comprehensive Heterocyclic Chemistry which appeared in 1984
and guided the preparation of its 1996 major supplement (10 volumes) as an Editor-in-Chief
and Chairman of the Editorial Board. He is Editor-in-Chief and Chairman of the Editorial
Board for Comprehensive Organic Functional Group Transformations published in seven
volumes in December 1995. His research through 1993 was
surveyed in Heterocycles, Volume 37, pp. 3-132 (1994) which lists his some 1400
publications up to this date. A light-hearted account of his early and mid-career appeared
in J. Het. Chem., Volume 31, pp. 569-602 (1994). His research group has averaged 40
persons over the past forty years and he keeps in touch with most of the some 700
ex-members by his home page
on the WWW. Ongoing topics in heterocyclic chemistry include tautomerism, aromaticity,
mechanisms of nucleophilic and electrophilic substitution, intramolecular interactions,
reactivity in general and synthetic methodology, particularly in applications of
benzotriazole chemistry to synthesis, and the use of QSPR to understand the effects of
structure on properties.
Alan Katritzky has traveled extensively, lecturing in four languages
at many academic and industrial locations world-wide and at numerous international
conferences. His group has always had very close contacts with industry and he presently
consults for 3M, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Exxon, Flexsys, Infinium, NutraSweet, Proctor &
Gamble, Reilly Industries, Trega, and Uniroyal.
He is Cavaliere Ufficiale de la Republica Italiana, Fellow of the
Royal Society (U.K.), Foreign Member of the Polish and Catalan Academies, and an Honorary
Member of the Italian and Polish Chemical Societies, the International Society of
Heterocyclic Chemistry and the Egyptian Society for Heterocyclic Chemistry. He holds
Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Madrid (Spain), Poznan and Gdansk (Poland),
East Anglia (U.K.), Toulouse (France), St. Petersburg and Rostov (Russia) and Bucharest
(Romania), Honorary Professorships from Beijing and Xian (China), medals from Brussels
(Belgium), Tartu (Estonia), Thessaloniki (Greece), Ferrania - 3M (Italy), the Royal
Society of Chemistry (UK), Heterocycles (Japan), the Czech Republic, and the Institute of
Synthesis (Latvia), a Senior Humboldt Award from Germany, the Florida ACS Award, and the
Golden Tiger Award of the Exxon Corporation.
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