Leo Paquette Legacy Symposium
Leo A. Paquette was born in Worcester, MA. He received his B.S. degree from Holy Cross College in 1956 and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from MIT in 1959. After serving as a Research Associate at the Upjohn Company from 1959 to 1963, he joined the faculty of The Ohio State University. He was promoted to full professor in 1969, held the Kimberly Professorship from 1981-1987 and was named Distinguished University Professor in 1987. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1984, Dr. Paquette has been a Visiting Professor at institutions across the United States and Europe. He has served on advisory committees of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). He has been a member of the editorial boards of numerous publications including the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Organic Syntheses, Organic Reactions, and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Electronic Encyclopedia of Organic Reagents (eEros).
Dr. Paquette’s honors include the Sloan Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the ACS, S.T. Li prize for Science and Technology, and he was chosen as the Centenary Lecturer of the Royal Chemical Society. He has been a fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and has been selected as the Plenary Lecturer for more than a dozen international conferences. He is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate from his alma mater. In the field of hydrocarbon chemistry, Dr. Paquette is best known for achieving the first total synthesis of the Platonic solid dodecahedrane in 1982, which still stands as one of the landmark achievements in the history of organic synthesis and hydrocarbon chemistry.