Kendall Houk

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kendall Newcomb Houk (b. 1943) is a Professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Professor Houk was born in Nashville, Tennessee and received his A.B. (1964), B.S. (1966), and Ph.D. (1968) from Harvard University working with R. A. Olofson during his undergraduate work and R. B. Woodward for his graduate work. He joined the faculty at Louisiana State University in 1968 and becoming Professor in 1976. He moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1980. In 1986, he moved to U.C.L.A., becoming a Distinguished Professor in 1987.

The following biography is from Dr. Houk's website:

"Professor Houk was a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar and a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He received the L.S.U. Distinguished Research Master Award in 1968, the von Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist Award in 1981, the Akron A.C.S. Section Award in 1984, and an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in 1988. He was the 1991 recipient of the ACS James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry and 1998 winner of the Schrödinger Medal of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC). He received the Bruylants Chair from the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium in 1998, and an honorary doctorate (Dr. rer. nat. h. c.) from the University of Essen in Germany in 1999. He has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton University, and has served on the Advisory Boards of the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation, the Petroleum Research Fund, a variety of journals, including Accounts of Chemical Research, the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Chemical and Engineering News, and the Journal of Computational Chemistry, and as a member of the NIH Medicinal Chemistry Study Section and the NRC Board of Chemical Sciences and Technology. From 1988-1990, he was Director of the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation. He was Chairman of the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 1991-1994. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the WATOC. He was the 2003 Recipient of the ACS Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research Award. He is the Director of the UCLA Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Program and Chair of the AAAS Chemistry Section.

Professor Houk is an authority on theoretical organic chemistry, and his group is involved in developments of rules to understand reactivity, computer modeling of complex organic reactions, and experimental tests of the predictions of theory. Among current interests are the theoretical investigation of antibody-catalyzed reactions, the quantitative modelling of asymmetric reactions used in synthesis, and the molecular dynamics and reactions of hemicarcerands and other host-guest complexes. He has published over 600 articles in refereed journals and was one of the Top 100 Cited Chemists in the period 1981-1997."

He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science

[edit] External links

• Professor Houk's Website