It saddens me to report the death on January 31 of a dear friend, Jack Halpern, Louis Block Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Chemistry. He was born 1925 in Poland, and grew up in Canada, where he earned the BS degree in 1946 and then the PhD at McGill University in 1949. After teaching at the University of British Columbia for 12 years, he joined the Chicago faculty as Professor in 1962. He was named Louis Block Professor in 1971 and Distinguished Service Professor in 1984.

His work, notably on the reactions of hydrogen with metal complexes in solution, laid the foundation for key developments in the field of homogeneous catalysis that are now being pursued in academic and industrial research laboratories worldwide. He also made seminal contributions to understanding the mechanisms of asymmetric catalysts, which add hydrogen selectively to one face of a molecule to make one of the "mirror images" of the resulting product. Increasingly, pharmaceuticals -- for example, L-dopa, a drug for the treatment of Parkinson's disease -- are made by such processes. His work on the reactions of hydrogen with metal complexes in solution laid the foundation for key developments in catalysis and influenced academic and industrial research laboratories worldwide. His many honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences and to the vice presidency of that organization. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Royal Society of London, having been elected as Fellow in 1974. From the American Chemical Society he won the Willard Gibbs Award (1986), and awards for Inorganic Chemistry, Organometallic Chemistry, and the Distinguished Service in Inorganic Chemistry, the latter in partial recognition of his editorship of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He was co-recipient in 1994 of the Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry. 

Here at the University of Chicago he was a devoted supporter of the Smart Museum and of Court Theatre. He will be greatly missed.

-David Bevington, Secretary of Faculty Emeriti and co-chair of the Emeriti Steering Committee

Read more about Professor Halpern via UChicago News.