Jack Halpern (chemist)

Jack Halpern (19 January 1925 – 31 January 2018) was an inorganic chemist, the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. Born in Poland, he moved to Canada in 1929 and the United States in 1962.

His research focused on mechanistic organometallic chemistry, especially homogeneous catalysis, beginning with early work on the activation of hydrogen by soluble complexes. He contributed to elucidation of the mechanism of the hydrogenation of alkenes by Wilkinson's catalyst and the stereodetermining step in certain asymmetric hydrogenation processes. Related areas of interest include the reactivity of metal-carbon bonds, e.g., in cobalamins and pentacyanocobaltate derivatives.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974. From the American Chemical Society he won the Willard Gibbs Award (1986), and awards for Inorganic Chemistry, Organometallic Chemistry, and the Distinguished Service in Inorganic Chemistry, the latter in partial recognition of his editorship of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

References

1925 births

2018 deaths

American chemists

American people of Polish-Jewish descent

Canadian chemists

Canadian emigrants to the United States

Jewish Canadian scientists

Canadian people of Polish-Jewish descent

Fellows of the Royal Society

Jewish American scientists

Jewish chemists

Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences

Polish emigrants to Canada

University of Chicago faculty

20th-century Canadian chemists

20th-century American scientists

21st-century American chemists

Academic staff of the University of British Columbia

Scientists from British Columbia

21st-century American Jews