Mosher Award
2009
The Carol and Harry Mosher Award is
granted annually to an ACS member chosen from the national community
who has demonstrated excellence in chemistry, worked to insure
advancement of the chemical profession and has participated fully in
the ACS on a national, regional and local level. This award was
established in 1980 in honor of Harry and Carol Mosher, two founding
members of the Santa Clara Valley Section who both epitomize these
values. The Mosher award recipient is presented with an engraved plaque
and an honorarium, usually at the January dinner meeting of the
Section, although in 2009 it was presented in March, to accommodate Dr.
Brown's schedule.
The recipient of the 2008 Harry and Carol Mosher
Award was Dr. Theodore "Ted" Brown, Emeritus Professor, University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Brown gave a presentation
titled: "The Voice of Science in Society" at the monthly dinner meeting
on March 19, 2009.
In research, Ted Brown has been a world leader in
opening new areas for investigation. His pioneering work on
organolithium chemistry provided the first 7Li NMR spectra of these
compounds and established their dynamic and aggregative character. His
classic work on substitution reactions of a wide range of metal
carbonyls pioneered the use of flash photolysis for these compounds and
revealed new principles and reaction pathways. Brown also opened up the
field of nuclear quadrupole resonance for transition metals as well as
for nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen.
Dr. Brown was the Beckman Institute's Founding Director, serving as its
first director until his retirement in 1993. He presently serves on the
Board of Directors of the Beckman Foundation, which has been effective
in supporting basic research and developing young scientists in
chemistry and the life sciences.
He has written four chemistry books. The text Chemistry: The Central Science,
coauthored
initially
with
Gene
LeMay,
Jr.
now in its 11th edition,
coauthored with LeMay, Bruce Bursten and Catherine Murphy, has become
the single most widely used general chemistry textbook ever
published. Brown's recent writing has been directed at a larger
audience with the publication of Making Truth: Metaphor in Science
(University of Illinois Press, 2003).
Natalie
McClure,
Chair
Mosher
Award
Committee
Carol Mosher,Ted Brown and
Natalie McClure