Organic Chemistry Tapa dura - 2007

T.W. Graham Solomons did his undergraduate work at the Citadel and received his doctorate in organic chemistry in 1959 from Duke University where he worked with C.K. Bradsher. Following this he was a Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Rochester where he worked with V. Boekelheide. In 1960 he became a charter member of the faculty of the University of South Florida and became Professor of Chemistry in 1973. In 1992 he was made Professor Emeritus. In 1994 he was a visiting professor with the Faculty des Sciences Pharmaceutiques et Biologiques, Universite Rene Descartes (Paris V). He is a member of Sigma Xi, Phi Lambda Upsilon, and Sigma Pi Sigma. He has received research grants from the Research Corporation and the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund. For several years he was director of an NSF-sponsored Undergraduate Research Participation Program at USF. His research interests have been in the areas of heterocyclic chemistry and unusual aromatic compounds. He has published papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Journal of Organic Chemistry, and the Journal of Heterocyclic Chemistry. He has received several awards for distinguished teaching. His organic chemistry textbooks have been widely used for 20 years and have been translated into French, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Malaysian, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Italian. He and his wife Judith have a daughter who is a building conservator, a son who is an artist, and another son who is a graduate student studying biochemistry.

Craig Barton Fryhle is Chair and Professor of Chemistry at Pacific Lutheran University. He earned his B.A. degree from Gettysburg College and Ph.D. from Brown University. His experiences at these institutions shaped his dedication to mentoring undergraduate students in chemistry and the liberal arts, which is a passion that burns strongly for him. His research interests have been in areas relating to the shikimic acid pathway, including molecular modeling and NMR spectrometry of substrates and analogues, as well as structure and reactivity studies of shikimate pathway enzymes using isotopic labeling and mass spectrometry. He has mentored many students in undergraduate research, a number of whom have later earned their Ph.D. degrees and gone on to academic or industrial positions. he has participated in workshops on fostering undergraduate participation in research, and has been an invited participant in efforts by the National Science Foundation to enhance undergraduate research in chemistry. He has received research and instrumentation grants from ten National Science Foundation, the M.J Murdock Charitable Trust, and other private foundations.

His work in chemical education, in addition to textbook co-authorship, involves incorporation of student-let teaching in the classroom and technology-based strategies in organic chemistry.

He has also developed experiments for undergraduate students inorganic laboratory and instrumental analysis courses. He has been a volunteer with the hands-on science program in Seattle public schools, and chair of the Puget Sound Section of the American Chemical Society. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two daughters.