Posthumous Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Vera V. Mainz is a retired Director of the NMR Lab in the School of Chemical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics at Kansas Newman College (1976), a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley (1981, with R. A. Andersen), spent 1-1/2 years working at Rohm and Haas in Springhouse, PA, and had a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign (1983-1985) before becoming Director of the NMR Lab. She was elected to the position of Secretary-Treasurer of the History of Chemistry Division (HIST) of the ACS in 1995, and has served as Secretary-Treasurer since then. Her interest in the HIST Division was kindled when she presented her work on thechemical genealogy of the University of Illinois (UI) Chemistry Department at a HIST symposium on chemical genealogies in 1994. She has continued her work in this area, posting her information to a website athttp://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mainzv/Web_Genealogy/, and plans to update this project when her schedule allows. Vera's interest in the history of chemistry led her and her husband, Gregory Girolami, to co-curate two exhibits at the Univ. of Illinois's Rare Book Room: 1) From Alchemy to Chemistry: Five Hundred Years of Rare and Interesting Books, http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mainzv/exhibit/; 2) Crystallography-Defining the Shape of Our Modern World, found online at URLhttp://www.scs.illinois.edu/xray_exhibit/. Vera was a member of the ACS Fellows Class of 2012, which honored her contributions to the ACS (HIST and local section service) and the many students she helped while working in the NMR Lab. E. Thomas (Tom) Strom is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), where he teaches organic and polymer chemistry. He came to UTA after retiring from Mobil in Dallas, where he worked 32 years as a research chemist studying oil field chemistry. He was Chair of the ACS Division ofthe History of Chemistry in 2011-2012. His research interests are in the history of chemistry and the study of anion radicals by electron spin resonance spectroscopy. He was one of the initial ACS Fellows and is a past winner of the Dallas-Fort Worth ACS Section's Doherty Award. He received his B.S. Chem degree from the University of Iowa, his M.S. Chem degree in nuclear chemistry from UC Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry from Iowa State University working under mentor GlenA. Russell. Previously he has co-edited four volumes in the ACS Symposium Series: "100+ Years of Plastics. Leo Baekeland and Beyond" (2011), "Pioneers of Quantum Chemistry" (2013), "The Foundations of Physical Organic Chemistry: Fifty Years of the James Flack Norris Award" (2015), and "The PosthumousNobel Prize in Chemistry. Volume 1. Correcting the Errors and Oversights of the Nobel Prize Committee" (2017).