Corwin Hansch

Corwin Herman Hansch (October 6, 1918 – May 8, 2011) was a professor of chemistry at Pomona College in California. He became known as the 'father of computer-assisted molecule design.'

Education and career
Hansch was born on October 6, 1918, in Kenmare, North Dakota. He earned a BS from the University of Illinois in 1940 and a PhD from New York University in 1944. He briefly worked as a postdoc at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Hansch worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and as a group leader at DuPont Nemours in Richland, Washington. In February 1946 he received an academic position at Pomona College, where he taught until 1988. Hansch completed sabbaticals at ETH Zurich with Vladimir Prelog and at University of Munich with Rolf Huisgen.

Hansch taught Organic Chemistry for many years at Pomona College, and was known for giving complex lectures without using notes. His course in Physical Bio-Organic Medicinal Chemistry was ground-breaking at an undergraduate level.

Hansch may be best known as the father of the concept of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR), the quantitative correlation of the physicochemical properties of molecules with their biological activities.

He is also noted for the Hansch equation, which is used in
 * Multivariate Statistics - Multivariate statistics is a set of statistical tools to analyse data (e.g., chemical and biological) matrices using regression and/or pattern recognition techniques.
 * Hansch Analysis - Hansch analysis is the investigation of the quantitative relationship between the biological activity of a series of compounds and their physicochemical substituent or global parameters representing hydrophobic, electronic, steric and other effects using multiple regression correlation methodology.
 * Hansch-Fujita $$\pi$$ constant - The Hansch-Fujita $$\pi$$ constant describes the contribution of a substituent to the lipophilicity of a compound.

Research Interests: Organic Chemistry; Interaction of organic chemicals with living organisms, Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSAR).


 * Fragment based regression analysis for quantitative structure-activity relationship (Hansch-analysis)

Death
He died of pneumonia on May 8, 2011, in Claremont, California, at 92.