Prof. Dr. Jack Dunitz
Jack Dunitz (1923) studied chemistry at Glasgow University, (Ph.D. 1947) and held research fellowship at Oxford University (1946-1948, 1951-1953), the California Institute of Technology (1948-1951, 1953-1954), the U.S. National Institute of Health, Bethesda MD (1954-1955), and the Royal Institution, London (1956-1957), before taking up a professorship at the ETH-Zürich, a post that he held until his retirement in 1990. He has held Visiting Professorships in the United States, Israel, Japan, Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Dunitz's research involved the use of crystal structure analysis as tool for studying chemical problems, e.g. structure and reactivity of medium-ring compounds, ion-specificity of natural and synthetic ionophores, chemical reaction paths, molecular motions, electron density distributions, polymorphism, phase transformations in solids, solid-state chemical reactions, analysis of weak intermolecular interactions in condensed phases. He was the recipient of the Paracelsus Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society (1986), the Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1990), the Buerger Award of the American Crystallographic Association (1991), among others.
Dunitz was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts; he was also a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was an Honorary Member of the Swiss Society of Crystallography, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Swiss Chemical Society.
More recent work has focussed on problems of polymorphism, phase transformations in solids and solid-state chemical reactions, analysis of weak intermolecular interactions in condensed phases, virtual crystallography, and crystal structure prediction.
Dunitz has written more than 350 scientific papers and is the author of 'X-Ray Analysis and the Structure of Organic Molecules' (Cornell University Press, 1979; Verlag HCA, Basel, 1995) and 'Reflections on Symmetry in Chemistry...and Elsewhere' (with E. Heilbronner, Verlag HCA, Basel, 1993).
Jack Dunitz died on September 12, 2021 at the age of 98.