John F. Hartwig

Educational Background
A.B. Princeton University, 1986
Undergraduate thesis advisor: Maitland Jones Jr.

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1990
Ph.D. advisors: Richard A. Anderson and Robert G. Bergman

American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990-1992
Postdoctoral advisor: Stephen J. Lippard

Awards
2023 Sven Berggren Prize, Royal Physiographic Society, Sweden
2023 Akira Suzuki Award
2022 Emanuel Merck Lectureship Award
2021 Arthur C. Cope Award
2020 John Gamble Kirkwood Award
2019 Wolf Prize in Chemistry
2018 Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry
2018 John C. Bailor Jr. Medal, University of Illinois
2018 Centenary Prize, Royal Society of Chemistry
2015 J. Willard Gibbs Medal Award, Chicago Section of the ACS
2015 Elected Member, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
2014 Tetrahedron Chair at the Belgium Symposium on Organic Synthesis
2014 Sierra Nevada Section of the ACS Distinguished Chemist Award
2014 Organometallics Senior Fellowship
2014 National Institutes of Health MERIT Award
2014 Nagoya Gold Medal Award
2014 Janssen Pharmaceutica Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis
2013 Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods
2013 ACS Catalysis Lectureship for the Advancement of Catalytic Science
2012 Member, National Academy of Sciences
2011 Einstein Fellowship, Berlin
2010 GlaxoSmithKline Scholars Award
2009 National Institutes of Health MERIT Award
2009 Mitsui Chemicals Catalysis Science Award, Japan
2009 Joseph Chatt Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry
2009 Edward Mack Jr. Memorial Award, Ohio State University
2008 Paul N. Rylander Award of the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society
2008 Mukaiyama Award from the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry of Japan
2008 International Association of the Catalysis Societies (IACS) Award
2007 Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award in Organic Synthesis
2007 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences
2006 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry
2004 Thieme-IUPAC Prize in Synthetic Organic Chemistry
2003 Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award
1997 Eli Lilly Grantee
1997 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award
1997 A.C. Cope Scholar
1996-1998 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow
1995, 1996 Union Carbide Innovative Recognition Award
1994 NSF Young Investigator Award
1993 DuPont Young Professor Award
1992 Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award

Full CV

Biographical Sketch

John F. Hartwig was born outside of Chicago in 1964 and was raised in upstate New York. He received a B.A. degree in 1986 from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. degree in 1990 from the University of California, Berkeley under the collaborative direction of Robert Bergman and Richard Andersen. After an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Lippard, he began an appointment at Yale University in 1992, where he was an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and then full Professor until 2004. In 2004, he was named the Irénée P. duPont Professor of Chemistry. In August of 2006, Professor Hartwig moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was named the Kenneth L. Rinehart Jr. Professor of Chemistry. In August 2011, Professor Hartwig moved to his current position on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry.

Professor Hartwig's research focuses on the discovery and understanding of new reactions catalyzed by transition metal complexes. He has developed a selective catalytic functionalization of alkanes, a method for formation of arylamines and aryl ethers from aryl halides or sulfonates, a method for the direct conversion of carbonyl compounds to alpha-aryl carbonyl derivatives, a system for the catalytic addition of amines to vinylarenes and dienes, and highly selective catalysts for the regio and enantioselective amination of allylic carbonates. With each system, his group has conducted extensive mechanistic investigations. He has revealed several new classes of reductive eliminations, has isolated discrete compounds that functionalize alkanes, and has reported unusual three-coordinate arylpalladium complexes that are intermediates in cross coupling.