Jack Dunitz#

Obituary ETH Zürich

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Curriculum vitae#

Academic degrees and honours:

• B. Sc., Glasgow University, 1944; Ph. D., Glasgow University, 1947 (research supervisor, J. Monteath Robertson)
• Honorary D. Sc., Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), 1990
• Honorary Ph. D, Weizmann Institute of Science, 1992
• Honorary D. Sc., Glasgow University, 1999
• Overseas Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge, 1968
• Fellow of the Royal Society of London, 1974
• Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, 1979
• Member of Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, 1979
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 1981
• Foreign Associate, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 1988
• Member of Academia Europaea, 1989
• Honorary Member, Swiss Society of Crystallography, 1990
• Member, European Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1991
• Foreign Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1997.
• Foreign Member, American Philosophical Society, 1997
• Honorary Fellow, Royal Society of Chemistry, 2000.
• Honorary Member, Swiss Chemical Society, 2004.
• Centenary Lecture and Medal, Chemical Society, London, 1977
• Havinga Lecture and Medal, University of Leiden, 1980
• Tishler Award, Harvard University, 1985
• Paracelsus Prize, Swiss Chemical Society, 1986
• Bijvoet Lecture and Medal, University of Utrecht, 1989
• Gregori Aminoff Prize, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1990
• Buerger Award, American Crystallographic Association, 1991
• Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, American Chemical Society, 1997

Positions held:

• 1956 - 1948, 1951 - 1953 Research Fellow, Chemical Crystallography Laboratory, Oxford University
• 1948 - 1951, 1953 - 1954 A. A. Noyes Research Fellow, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California
• 1954 - 1955 Visiting Scientist, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
• 1956 - 1957 Senior Research Fellow, Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory, The Royal Institution, London
• 1957 - 1990 Professor of Chemical Crystallography, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland (Full Professor since 1964)
• 1990 retired

Visiting Professorships, etc.

• 1965 Distinguished Visiting Professor at Iowa State University
• 1966 3M Visiting Lectureship in Chemistry, University of Minnesota
• 1967 Visiting Professor at Tokyo University
• 1970 Visiting Professor at Technion, Haifa
• 1976 George Fisher Baker Visiting Lecturer, Cornell University
• 1983 Hill Visiting Professor, University of Minnesota
• 1985 Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, California Institute of Technology
• 1987 Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor, McMaster University
• 1990 Alexander Todd Visiting Professor, Cambridge University
• 1991 Oscar K. Rice Visiting Lecturer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 1991 BBV Foundation Chair, Spain.
• 1992 Robert Burns Woodward Visiting Professor, Harvard University

Lectureships

• 1965 British Council Lecturer at Manchester University
• Treat B. Johnson Lecturer, Yale University
• 1971 Reilly Lecturer, University of Notre Dame
• Kelly Lecturer, Purdue University
• 1973 Gerhard Schmidt Memorial Lecturer, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot
• Plenary Lecture, First European Crystallographic Meeting, Bordeaux
• 1975 Frank A. Gooch Lecturer, Yale University
• Frontiers in Chemistry Lecturer, Case Western Reserve University
• Phillips Lecturer, Haverford University
• General Lecture, 10th International Congress of Crystallography, Amsterdam
• 1979 Appleton Lecturer, Brown University
• 1980 H. J. Backer Lecturer, University of Groningen
• 1981 Karl Folkers Lecturer, University of Wisconsin
• 1982 Conference Lecture, 7th European Crystallography Meeting, Jerusalem
• 1983 A L. Patterson Memorial Lecturer, Institute for Cancer Research, Philadelphia
• 1984 Plenary Lecturer, 13th International Congress of Crystallography, Hamburg
• 1985 Pacific Coast Lecturer
• 1987 Carl Shipp Marvel Lecturer, University of Illinois
• 1988 Bergmann Lecturer, Yale University
• 1989 Birch Lecturer, Australian National University, Canberra
• Dwyer Memorial Lecturer, University of New South Wales, Sydney
• 1990 David Ginsburg Memorial Lecturer, IUPAC Conference, Haifa
• 1999 Blomquist Lecturer, Cornell University
• Bragg Lecturer, 18th International Congress of Crystallography, Glasgow
• Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, Member Board of Governors, 1987-1999

Professional Societies, etc.

• Royal Society of Chemistry (Honorary Fellow)
• British Crystallographic Association
• American Chemical Society
• American Crystallographic Association
• American Association for the Advancement of Science (Fellow)
• Swiss Chemical Society (Honorary Member)
• Swiss Society of Crystallography (Honorary Member)

Research Interests

Use of crystal structure analysis as tool for studying chemical problems, e.g. structure and reactivity of medium-ring compounds, ion-specificity of natural and synthetic ionophores, structure-energy relationships. Mathematical aspects of structure (use of graph theory, group theory, geometric constraints, etc.).

Mapping reaction paths from information provided by results of crystal structure analysis helped to bridge the gap between the "statics" of crystals and the "dynamics" of reacting chemical systems. Other work in this direction included new interpretations of atomic displacement tensors in terms of internal molecular motions, and studies of experimental electron density distributions from accurate low-temperature X-ray data.

More recent work has focussed on problems of polymorphism, phase transformations in solids and solid-state chemical reactions, analysis of weak intermolecular interactions in condensed phases, virtual crystallography, and crystal structure prediction.