Kendall Houk
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| Kendall Newcomb Houk | |
| Born | February 27, 1943 Nashville, Tennessee, United States |
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| Fields | Chemistry |
| Institutions | U.C.L.A. |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert Burns Woodward  |
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Kendall Newcomb Houk (b. 1943) is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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[edit] Life
Professor Houk was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1943. He received his A.B. (1964), B.S. (1966), and Ph.D. (1968) degrees from Harvard University, working with R. A. Olofson as an undergraduate and Robert Burns Woodward as a graduate student in the area of experimental tests of orbital symmetry selection rules. In 1968, he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge becoming Professor in 1976 . In 1980, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh, and in 1986, he moved to University of California, Los Angeles, becoming a Distinguished Professor in 1987. From 1988-1990, he was Director of the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation. He is currently the Chair of the NIH Synthesis and Biological Chemistry-A Study Section and is a Senior Editor of Accounts of Chemical Research. He is Director of the UCLA Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Program, an NIH-supported training grant.
[edit] Research Interests
Kendall Houk research focuses on theoretical and computational organic chemistry. 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. He collaborates prodigiously with chemists all over the world. Among current interests are the theoretical investigations and design of enzyme-catalyzed reactions, a collaboration that has recently led to the first successful design and synthesis of enzymes for non-natural reactions,[1],[2] the quantitative modeling of asymmetric reactions used in synthesis,[3],[4] the mechanisms and dynamics of pericyclic reactions and competing diradical processes, including a new theory of 1,3-dipolar cycloadditions,[5],[6] the mechanisms of organometallic reactions,[7],[8] and the molecular dynamics and reactions of hemicarcerands and other host-guest complexes. He has published over 700 articles in refereed journals and is among the 100 most-cited chemists.[9]
[edit] Awards
Houk was Chairman of the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 1991-1994. He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and is a Fellow of the AAAS and of the WATOC. 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 Foundation 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 was the 1998 winner of the Schrödinger Medal of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC). He was the Faculty Research Lecturer at UCLA for 1998. 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 won the Tolman Medal of the Southern California Section of the American Chemical Society in 1999. He has been an Erskine Fellow in New Zealand and a Lady Davis Fellow at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. In 2001, he was a JSPS Fellow in Japan.
