Allan Day Term Chair: Dr. Molander

Dean Samuel H. Preston has announced that Dr. Gary Molander, professor of chemistry, has been appointed to the Allan Day Term Chair.

Dr. Molander received his B.S. from Iowa State University in 1975 and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1979. He has been a professor of organic chemistry at Penn since 1999. He began his career at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1981. Dr. Molander's teaching and research focus on the development of new synthetic methods and their application to the synthesis of organic molecules.

He has served as a visiting professor at Université de Paris-Sud, Orsay, France; Philipps Universität, Marburg, Germany; École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle de Paris, France; Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil; Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil; Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina; Institute of Organometallic Chemistry; Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia; Institut de Recherche en Chimie Organique Fine, Rouen, France; and Universidad da Santa Maria, Brazil.

He is an associate editor of Organic Letters, a member of the editorial board of Organometallics, the chair of the Philadelphia Organic Chemists Club, and an alternate councilor of the Philadelphia Section of the American Chemical Society. He has received the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society and the American Cyanamid Academic Award and has held fellowships from Eastman Kodak, the NIH, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has authored or co-authored more than 130 journal articles.

The Allan Day Term Chair was created in 2001 by Dr. Madeleine M. Joullié, professor of chemistry, and her husband, Richard Prange, to support a faculty member specializing in organic chemistry. The chair is named for Dr. Allan R. Day, a former Penn chemistry professor and Dr. Joullié's mentor