Sason Shaik

Sason Shaik (* 1948 in Baghdad ) is an Israeli chemist (theoretical chemistry, quantum chemistry ). He is Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Director of the Lise Meitner Minerva Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, which he co-founded in 1997.

Shaik was in Israel from 1951 and studied after military service from 1965 to 1968 chemistry at the Bar Ilan University with a bachelor's degree in 1972 and a master's degree in 1974. He then went to the University of Washington as a Fulbright Fellow , where he was in 1978 at ND Epiotis doctorate was (spin inversion in triplet Reactions). As a post-doctoral student , he was with Roald Hoffmann at Cornell University . From 1979 he was a lecturer at Ben Gurion University , where he became associate professor in 1984 and professor in 1988. Since 1992 he has been a professor at the Hebrew University.

Among other things, he was visiting professor in China and at the École normal supérieure .

From 1981 he developed a valence structure theory of reactivity, which led to a renewed interest in the theory, which had already been written off as outdated. He also dealt with fundamental questions of chemical bonding and aromaticity (influence and nature of electron delocalization, e.g. in benzene ). From the mid-1990s onwards he dealt with oxidation and bond activation using metal catalysts and enzymes.

In 2012 he received the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal and the Humboldt Research Prize . In 1987 he received the Israel Chemical Society Prize for Young Chemists and in 2001 the Israel Chemical Society Prize and the Kolthoff Prize. In 2007 he received the Schrödinger Medal of the WATOC (World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists). In 2005 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

Like his teacher Roald Hoffmann, he also writes poetry.

Fonts

• Shaik: Autobiography of Sason Shaik, J. Phys. Chem., 112, 2008, pp. 12724-12736
• with Philippe C. Hiberty: Valence Bond Theory, Wiley-Interscience 2008
• with H. Bernhard Schlegel, Saul Wolfe: Theoretical aspects of physical organic chemistry: the SN2 mechanism, Wiley-Interscience 1992
• Editor with Gernot Frenking: The chemical bond, 2 volumes, Wiley-VCH 2014
• What happens to molecules as they react? A valence bond approach to reactivity, J. American Chemical Society, Volume 103, 1981, 3692-3701
• mit PC Hiberty: When Does Electronic Delocalization Become an Important Driving Force of Molecular Shape and Stability? I. The Aromatic Sextet, J. Am. Chem. Soc., Vol. 107, 1985, 3089-3095
• with D. Danovich, A. Shurki: Why Does Benzene Possess a D6h Symmetry? A Quasiclassical State Approach for Probing π-Bonding and Delocalization Energies, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Volume 117, 1995, pp. 7760-7768
• with A. Shurki, D. Danovich, PC Hiberty: A Different Story of p-Delocalization: The Distortivity of p-Electrons and Its Chemical Manifestations, Chem. Rev., Volume 101, 2001, pp. 1501-1539
• with A. Shurki: Valence Bond Diagrams and Chemical Reactivity, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., Vol. 38, 1999, pp. 586-625
• with A. Shurki, D. Danovich, PC Hiberty: A Different Story of Benzene, The Proceeding of the WATOC Conference, July 1996, J. Mol. Struct. (THEOCHEM), 398-399, 155-167 (1997)
• with D. Schröder, H. Schwarz : Two-State Reactivity as a new Concept in Organometallic Chemistry, Acc. Chem. Res., Vol. 33, 2000, pp. 139-145
• with A. Fiedler, D. Schröder, H. Schwarz: Electronic Structures and Gas-Phase Reactivities of Cationic Late Transition-Metal Oxides, J. Am. Chem. Soc., Vol. 116, 1994, pp. 10734-10741

Web links

• Homepage
• Sason Shaik in the Theoretical Chemistry Genealogy Project