The Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture honors the legacy of Professor Howard Tieckelmann, who served on our faculty from 1948 until his retirement in 1987. Prof. Tieckelmann was an organic chemist with wide-ranging research interests and was a renowned teacher, having been promoted to SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in 1975. In his honor and for his contributions to the Department of Chemistry, UB and science at large, the Tieckelmann family, former students, and friends created the Tieckelmann Lecture Funds to commemorate Professor Howard Tieckelmann.
The Department of Chemistry is pleased to sponsor the inaugural Howard Tieckelmann lecture in organic chemistry. Professor Tieckelmann started his chemical studies at Carthage College in Illinois, where he earned a B.A. degree in 1942. Tieckelmann served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and then returned to Buffalo, where he received his doctorate in chemistry from UB in 1948 for a thesis entitled “The Preparation and Properties of Certain Orthocarbonates”. He served as an instructor at UB in his last year of graduate school and was appointed Assistant Professor in Chemistry in 1948. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1956, to Full Professor in 1961, and to Distinguished Teaching Professor in 1975. Professor Tieckelmann is remembered fondly in the Department for his service at both the Departmental and University level. He served as Director of Graduate Studies from 1960-69, as Department Vice-Chair from 1963-69, and as Chair from 1970-74. These were critical times, during which both the Department and University experienced tremendous growth associated with the transition from a smaller private institution to a member of the SUNY system. Professor Tieckelmann served on numerous University Committees. This service included two terms as Chair of the Faculty Council of Natural Science and Mathematics, and a term as Chair of the Presidents Board of Intercollegiate Athletics. Professor Tieckelmann was an organic chemist with many interests. He carried out detailed studies on the mechanism of Claisen and other rearrangement reactions. He was interested in the chemistry of various heterocycles including pyridines and pyrimidines and in the mechanism for their alkylation reactions. Studies on the intermediates of biosynthetic pathways were a mainstay of Tieckelmann’s research from 1970 to his retirement in 1987. Particularly notable are a series of papers published with his colleague Robert Guthrie on the detection and quantification of metabolites, including intermediates of the biosynthesis of porphyrins and of compounds that accumulate in patients suffering from metabolic diseases such as dicarboxylic aciduria. Professor Tieckelmann’s work was funded by grants from the Olin Matheson Company, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness. Of note was a grant from the National Cancer Institute to study the synthesis and evaluation of antimetabolites. This was funded from 1956-71 and at a total level of more than $1,000,000 that was a particularly large sum for these early days of Government supported research.
Guest Speaker: Omar Yaghi, PhD, The James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley
Location: 201 Natural Sciences Complex (NSC), University at Buffalo North Campus
14th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
Friday, May 10, 2024
Guest speaker: Professor Timothy M. Swager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: "Intrinsically Porous Organic Polymers in Sensing and Catalysis"
13th Annual Howard Tieckelamnn Memorial Lecture
Friday, April 28, 2023
Guest speaker: Professor Julie Zimmerman, Yale School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Yale School of the Environment
Title: "Designing a Green Chemistry Future"
12th Annual Howard Tieckelamnn Memorial Lecture
Friday, October 14, 2022
Guest speaker: Professor & President Andrew D. Hamilton, New York University
Title: "Design of Protein Mimetics for the Disruption of Protein-Protein Interactions in Cancer and other Diseases"
11th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
Friday, May 10, 2019
Guest speaker: Professor George M. Whitesides, Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor, Harvard University
Title: “New Kinds of Chemistry”
10th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
Friday, May 4, 2018
Guest speaker: Professor Peter J. Stang, Department of Chemistry, The University of Utah
Title: “Abiological Self-Assembly: Predesigned Metallacycles and Metallacages via Coordination”
9th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
Friday, May 12, 2017
Guest speaker: Professor David A. Tirrell, Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology
Title: “Reinterpreting the Genetic Code: How To Do It and Why You Might Want To”
8th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
April 13, 2016
Guest speaker: Professor Geraldine L. Richmond, Presidential Chair and Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of Oregon
Title: “Oil On Water: Calming The Seas But Not The Science”
7th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
April 17, 2015
Guest speaker: Professor William DeGrado, University of California, San Francisco
Title: “Analysis and Design of Membrane Proteins”
6th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
April 11, 2014
Guest speaker: Professor Thomas J. Meyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Title: “Finding the Way to Solar Fuels”
5th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
April 22, 2013
Guest speaker: Professor Richard N. Zare, Stanford University
Title: “Desorption Electrospray Ionization for Imaging and for Detection of Reaction Intermediates”
4th Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
October 19, 2012
Guest speaker: Peter G. Schultz, The Scripps Research Institute
Title: “Synthesis at the Interface of Chemistry and Biology: From Stem Cells to the Genetic Code”
3rd Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
April 29, 2011
Guest speaker: Professor Roald Hoffmann, Cornell University; 1981 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Title: “The Chemical Imagination at Work in Very Tight Places”
2nd Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
April 9, 2010
Guest speaker: Professor Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute; 2009 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Title: “Antibiotics Targeting the Ribosome”
1st Annual Howard Tieckelmann Memorial Lecture
April 9, 2010
Guest speaker: Professor Albert Padwa, Emory University
Title: “Cascade Reactions for Alkaloid Synthesis”