Lauri Vaska

Lauri Vaska ( born May 7, 1925 in Rakvere, Estonia) is an Estonian chemist.

Life and work

Lauri Vaska was born the son of Jacob and Emilie Vaska in ostestnischen Rakvere. He attended from 1933 to 1936 the primary school in today's Tallinn City District Hiiu, then from 1936 to 1940, the renowned Riiklik Inglise Kolledž in the Estonian capital. From 1940 to 1942 he studied at the Tallinna Keskkool 9 and 1942/43, at a school in Rakvere. From 1943 to 1945 Vaska participated as a soldier in World War II. With the war he fled before the Soviet occupation of Estonia to Germany.

He studied in 1946 at the Baltic University in Hamburg and later at the University of Göttingen, where he obtained his bachelor's degree. He moved to the University of Texas where he received his doctorate in the field of inorganic chemistry. This was followed by postdoctoral stays at Northwestern University in the field of magneto chemistry. There followed in 1957 a position as a fellow at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, where he remained for seven years. Vaska went then as an associate professor at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, where he retired in 1990.

Vaska published about 80 articles on the coordination chemistry of transition metals, homogeneous catalysis and bioinorganic chemistry, with its years have been very productive in Mellon. By J. W. Di Luzio he described in 1962 an iridium complex, which became known as Vaskas complex, trans- IrCl (CO) ( P ( C6H5) 3) 2 He showed that this complex undergoes a series of reactions with small molecules, such as the oxidative addition of hydrogen. He also studied the reversible addition of oxygen to the complex. He discovered the oxidative addition as one of the key steps in homogeneous catalysis.

Honors and Awards

Vaska has received numerous awards and honors, including the Boris Pregel Award for Research in Chemical Physics in 1971 and in 1981 became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for " pioneering work in the organometallic chemistry of transition metals and synthetic oxygen carriers ".

Private life

Lauri Vaska is married to the Texas artist Elaine Tucker. The couple has four sons and a daughter.