|
|
|
|
Phi Lambda Upsilon
|
 |
|
Brief Biography of Robert Bergman, University of California
at Berkeley Robert G. Bergman was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 23, 1942. After completing his undergraduate studies in chemistry at Carleton College in 1963, he received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in 1966 under the direction of Jerome A. Berson. Bergman spent 1966-67 as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization Fellow in Ronald Breslow's laboratories at Columbia, and following that went to the California Institute of Technology as a Noyes Research Instructor. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1969, associate professor in 1971, and full professor in 1973. He accepted an appointment as a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in July 1977, and moved his research group to Berkeley about a year later. While he was an assistant professor, Bergman received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1969) and a Camille and henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award (1970). He received a California Institute of Technology Student Government Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1978. In 1984, Bergman was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the second recipient of the American Chemical Society Award in Organometallic Chemistry (1986), and received an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the ACS in Fall, 1987. In 1991, he was granted a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. He received the E.O. Lawrence Award in Chemistry from the U.S. Department of Energy in 1994. He received the American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Award in 1996, and a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the American Institute of Chemists Chemical Pioneer Award in 1999. Bergman has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Journal of Organic Chemistry (1980-83 and 1996-present), Organometallics (1981-84 and 1992-95), Chemical Reviews (1981-84), the International Journal of Chemical Kinetics (1986-89), the Journal of the American Chemical Society (1990-95), Synlett (1989- present), and Organic Letters (1999- present). Bergman was trained as an organic chemist and spent the first part of his independent career at Caltech investigating the mechanisms of organic reactions. He also developed the methods for the generation and study of unusually reactive molecules, such as 1,3-diradicals and vinyl cations. In 1972 he discovered the thermal cyclization of cis-1,5-hexadiyne-3-enes to 1,4-dehydrobenzene diradicals. In the 1980's this transformation of ene-diynes was identified as a crucial DNA-cleaving reaction in several antibiotics that bind to nucleic acids, and the ene-diyne reaction is now commonly referred to as the "Bergman cyclization." In the mid-1970s, Bergman's research broadened to include organometallic chemistry. Since moving to Berkeley he has made contributions to the synthesis and chemistry of several types of organotransition metal complexes and to improving our understanding of the mechanisms of their reactions. In this area, he has focused on migratory insertion and oxidative addition reactions, the chemistry of dinuclear complexes, the investigation of organometallic compounds having metal-oxygen and -nitorgen bonds, and the reactions of organotransition metal enolates. He is probably best known for his discovery of the first soluble organometallic complexes that undergo intermolecular insertion of transition metals into the carbon-hydrogen bonds of alkanes, and the use of liquefied noble gas solvents in the study of these reactions. Internet: http://chem.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/bergman/bergman.html |
[About PLU]
[History]
[Purpose]
[Members]
[Minutes]
|