Jack Baldwin (chemist)

Sir Jack E. Baldwin ( born 1938 in London) is an English chemist and emeritus Waynflete Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Oxford.

Life and work

Baldwin studied at Imperial College in London and received his PhD in 1964 in the research group of Nobel Laureate Sir Derek Barton on the structure elucidation of Byssochlamsäure, a characteristic metabolic product of Byssochlamys fulva. 1967 Baldwin went to the Pennsylvania State University as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. In 1970 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he became in 1971 Professor of Organic Chemistry. The years to 1978, he spent the most at MIT, where he published his most important discovery that Baldwin's rules for ring closure reactions.

The Royal Society of Chemistry 1973 awarded him with the Corday - Morgan Medal. Five years later he was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society and took up a position at the job as Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, where he remained until his retirement in 2005, 27 years. He was knighted in 1997 with the accolade.

In recognition of his work on the synthesis and biosynthesis, particularly the β -lactam antibiotics and the associated biosynthetic problems in studying the enzymology of the process and the derivation of the crystal structure of isopenicillin N synthase Baldwin was awarded the Leverhulme Medal.

Although now emeritus, Baldwin is still active with a research group at the University of Oxford. The research focus is on the so-called Biomimetic chemistry.