Professor Jack R. Norton
Professor of Chemistry
Department of Chemistry, Columbia University
Lecture (1:15 pm, John Ascuaga's Nugget Resort and Casino - Bonanza Room A
Organometallic Reaction Mechanisms Session of the 61st Northwest Regional ACS meeting), June 26
CD observation of the interconversion of enantiomeric zirconaaziridines
Banquet (6:00 pm, John Ascuaga's Nugget Resort and Casino - Poolside Terrace), June 26
JACK R. NORTON was born May 5, 1945, in Dallas, Texas. He received a B.A. in Chemistry from Harvard in 1967 and a Ph.D. (with James P. Collman) from Stanford in 1971, and spent 1972 as a postdoctoral associate with J. Lewis in Cambridge (England). In 1973 he became Assistant Professor at Princeton; in 1979 he moved as Associate Professor to Colorado State University, where he became Professor of Chemistry in 1981. In 1997 he joined Columbia University's faculty. He was named a Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar in 1976, a Sloan Fellow in 1977, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1989. He received an Innovation Recognition Award from Union Carbide in 1985, a Humboldt Research Award in 1993, and a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1997. He has been Esso Distinguished Lecturer at the U. of Toronto (1987) and Lee Lecturer at the University of Chicago (2001). Norton was a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Organometallics between 1990 and 1994, and he was treasurer of the Inorganic Division of the ACS from 1988-1991. From 1992 to 2003, he served as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He was most recently honored with the 2005 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry.
Norton is best known for his work on the properties and reactions of transition-metal hydrides. It is work that has had a far-reaching impact on many of the most important processes in organometallic chemistry. His work on the kinetic and thermodynamic acidity of metal hydrides helped exploit the reactivity of metal hydrides as proton donors. He also carried out definitive studies of the kinetics of hydrogen atom transfer reactions of many of these same metal hydrides. He has found examples of H+, H, and H- transfer processes and has studied how the rates of all three depend upon acidity (pKa), bond strength, and other thermodynamic parameters. He developed the first general procedure for measuring the pKa values of transition-metal hydrides and compared these thermodynamic acidities with the rates of proton transfer reaction of these hydrides. He learned that metal acids behave much like carbon acids, with their proton transfer reactions proceeding slowly, owing to the requirement of substantial steric and electronic rearrangement.