Skip to main content

Fred Basolo Medal for Outstanding Research in Inorganic Chemistry

The Fred Basolo Medal was established by former students of Fred Basolo in appreciation for his contributions to inorganic chemistry at Northwestern University. After Fred arrived at Northwestern in 1946, a tradition of weekly inorganic chemistry group meetings started. As a result, the Department became one of the top inorganic chemistry departments in the U.S., a position it retains to this day. 

Fred Basolo was born in Coello, Illinois in 1920 and received a B.Ed, at Southern Illinois Normal University. He then went to the University of Illinois where he received a Ph.D. with John C. Bailar, Jr. in 1943. After working on a classified military research project during WWII, he joined the faculty at Northwestern in 1946. In 1980, the University honored him with the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professorship of Chemistry.

Internationally recognized for his original contributions to the syntheses and reaction mechanisms of transition-metal Werner complexes, Basolo did some of the seminal work in the developing fields of organometallic and bioinorganic chemistry. He was also a truly gifted teacher. Many of his former students occupy prominent academic and industrial positions. Basolo influenced students worldwide to study inorganic chemistry and received the 1992 ACS Pimentel Award in Chemical Education. He published 400 scientific publications and four books.

Basolo’s contributions to the profession of Chemistry were equally outstanding. He served as President of the American Chemical Society in 1983 and as Chairman of the Chemistry Section of AAAS in 1979. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences and its chairman in 1976. Some of the many honors received by Basolo include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, foreign membership in the Italian Academy of Sciences Lincei, as well as the ACS Awards for Research and for Service in Inorganic Chemistry. He received the first Joseph Chatt Medal, the 1996 Willard Gibbs Medal, and was the 2001 Priestley Medalist of the ACS. The Fred Basolo Papers are available through the Northwestern University Archives.


Past Basolo Medalists

2023

Paul Alivisatos

University of Chicago

2022 

Matthew Rosseinsky

University of Liverpool

2021

Tom O'Halloran

Michigan State

2020

Omar M. Yaghi

University of California, Berkeley

2019

Kim R. Dunbar

Texas A&M University

2018

Edward I. Solomon

Stanford University 

2017

Anthony K. Cheetham

University of Cambridge 

2016

Susumu Kitagawa

Kyoto University

2015

Clifford Kubiak

University of California, San Diego

2014

Makoto Fujita

University of Tokyo

2013

Marcetta Darensbourg

Texas A&M University

2012

Richard Eisenberg

University of Rochester

2011 

Gregory J. Kubas

Los Alamos National Laboratory

2010

Roald Hoffmann

Cornell University, 1981 Nobel Laureate

2009

Peter J. Stang

University of Utah

2008

Robert H. Grubbs

California Institute of Technology, 2005 Nobel Laureate

2007

Richard R. Schrock

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005 Nobel Laureate

2006

Ivano Bertini

University of Florence, Italy

2005

John E. Bercaw

California Institute of Technology

2004

Malcolm Chisholm

Ohio State University

2003

Daryle Busch

University of Kansas

2002

Stephen J. Lippard

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2001

M. Frederick Hawthorne   

University of California, Los Angeles

2000

James P. Collman

Stanford University

1999

Thomas J. Meyer

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

1998

Malcolm Green

University of Oxford, UK

1997

Kenneth N. Raymond

University of California, Berkeley

1996

Richard H. Holm

Harvard University

1995

Lawrence Dahl

University of Wisconsin, Madison

1994

Harry Gray

California Institute of Technology

1993

Jack Halpern

University of Chicago

1992

Henry Taube

Stanford University

1991

Ralph G. Pearson

University of California, Santa Barbara