User:JohnAanonson/sandbox

He was a heterocyclic chemistry pioneer, who played a leading role in the subject’s elucidation and development.

Early life and education

In 1940 he was evacuated with other children from his secondary school (Hornsey County Grammar School) to Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, and it was there that "his passion for chemistry was inspired by the chemistry master, W. E. Fieldhouse". Having returned to Harringay, he set up his own laboratory at home and on his fifteenth birthday he prepared his first heterocyclic compound, the barbiturate drug Veronal.

, initially to Trinity Hall, before becoming a founding fellow of Churchill College. During his time in Cambridge, he continued In 1963 Cambridge University honored him with the award of a DSc degree.

During this period his research elucidated understandings of aromaticity, structure and mechanisms of electrophilic substitution, in heterocyclic compounds. In 1967 together with Gurnos Jones and Charles Rees, he played a leading role in the creation of the Heterocyclic Group of the Chemical Society.

which was a research professorship, with no requirement to provide lectures to undergraduates. During his career, he supervised more than "300 graduate students and he worked with over 500 visiting faculty and postdoctoral fellows". He has been described as "forceful, direct and resolute in his professional life, but compassionate and warm in personal relationships."

For many years, Katritzky conducted annual worldwide lecture tours and over the course of his career "he served as a consultant to 32 companies throughout Europe and North America". When required, he was able to lecture and answer questions in German, French and Italian. Many of his lecture tours were organized through the British Council, national academies of science and chemical societies. Two of the companies for which he did consultancy were 3M and Pfizer. His consultancy for 3M lasted many years, with visits to their headquarters at St Paul, Minnesota, their Harlow laboratories, and their subsidiary Ferrania in Savona, Italy.

Publications

In the 1960s, Katritzky collaborated with Jeanne Lagowski to write two seminal textbooks: Heterocyclic Chemistry 1960 and Principles of Heterocyclic Chemistry 1967. The second book was translated into seven languages. In 1962 and 1965 respectively, he took on the editorship of two organic chemistry journals: Advances in Heterocyclic Chemistry and Tetrahedron Letters (UK editor). He relinquished the latter when he moved to the US in 1980, but in the same year he started as US editor for Tetrahedron and continued in this role until 1998. He and Charles Rees were jointly editors-in-chief of the eight volume Comprehensive Heterocyclic Chemistry, which was published in 1984. Katritzky also participated as an editor-in-chief of updates of this work, which were published in 1996 (eleven volumes) and 2008 (fifteen volumes).

In 2000, Katritzky founded Arkivoc, an open access journal which is free to both readers and authors. He and his wife Linde made a charitable donation to start Arkivoc, hoping that the journal would particularly help authors and readers in developing countries. In the same year, Katritzky started annual Florida Heterocyclic & Synthetic Chemistry conferences, anticipating that they could provide revenue to support the journal.

Honors and awards

“His work was recognized throughout the world by 33 honorary doctorates or professorships and awards.” Amongst the latter were:

•	Tilden Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (1975) •	Fellow of the Royal Society, England (1980) •	Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2000) •	Cope Senior Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society (2002) •	Robert Robinson Lectureship (2009)

Family

They had four children: Margaret, Erika, Rupert, and Freda.