Anthony Joseph Arduengo III

Anthony Joseph Arduengo III is Professor of the Practice at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Saxon Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Alabama, adjunct professor at the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry of Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany, and co-founder of the StanCE coalition for sustainable chemistry based on woody biomass (Xylochemistry).

He is notable for his work on chemical compounds with unusual valency, especially in the field of stable carbene research.

Anthony "Bo" Arduengo was born in 1952 in Tampa, Florida.

He grew up in the Atlanta, Georgia area.

His father was a pressman and mechanic with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and instilled his son with an interest and skill for all things mechanical and scientific.

By the age of 16, he and his father had built his first car from miscellaneous parts.

The car was registered as street-legal and road-worthy.

In 1969 he left high school with enrollment in Georgia Tech's Joint Enrollment Program for High School Students (JEPHS).

In 1971 he was inducted into the Iota chapter of ΚΚΨ.

He was awarded NSF undergraduate fellowships in 1972 & 1973 when he had moved to research in the Burgess group.

As an undergraduate, Arduengo was a member of the Georgia Tech Band and served as Executive Officer and Captain for that organization.

In 1972 he was tapped by the Alpha Eta Circle of ΟΔΚ; later serving as Secretary and President for the local Circle.

He obtained his BSc (1974, cum laude) and his PhD (1976) at Georgia Tech, advised by Edward M. Burgess.

That made him an academic descendant of Justus von Liebig.

As an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, Arduengo's research activities began in the laboratory of Professor Charles L. Liotta.

Arduengo was a research scientist at DuPont from 1976 to 1977 and from 1984 to 1998, and assistant professor at the University of Illinois from 1977 to 1984.

In DuPont's Central Research and Development Department, Arduengo began his career in the Chemical Sciences Section (1977 & on return in 1984).

In 1977 when he joined E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Arduengo became a member of the exploratory chemistry group of Howard Simmons in CR&D.

His first research project involved trimethylsilyl esters of inorganic acids as reagents for organic synthesis.

At Illinois Arduengo examined more broadly the areas of organo-main group element chemistry, and molecules containing unusual valency.

His first publications involving the chemistry of electron-deficient carbenes occurred during this period.

This work with electron deficient carbenes led to the first structure determinations on a nitrile ylide and a carbonyl ylide.

His later work with carbene chemistry would become his most recognized contribution to the field of chemistry (vide infra).

During the Illinois years Arduengo had a close collaboration with his colleague J.C. Martin who was a physical-organic chemist also working on organo-main group element chemistry and hypervalency.

Many of the technical discussions between Martin and Arduengo would take place over lunch (the choice of restaurants often influenced by the quality of the napkins for writing chemical structures).

To facilitate discussions about unusual molecular structures and bonding for main-group element centers, Martin and Arduengo devised the N-X-L nomenclature system.

The synthesis and characterization of the first compound with a planar T-shaped, 10-electron 3-coordinate bonding arrangement at a phosphorus atom, ADPO, was also accomplished by the Arduengo group at Illinois and paved the way for a range of novel main-group element chemistry (including the discovery of edge inversion) on his return to DuPont.

The final Illinois research extended the newly discovered ADPO chemistry to the arsenic analog (ADAsO).

On returning to DuPont in 1984, Arduengo resumed a position in CR&D and continued the research into the recently discovered ADPO molecule and related structures.

In 1988 he was appointed Research Leader.

A move into the Polymer Science section of CR&D in 1991 was accompanied by promotion to Group Leader.

His final position with DuPont was as Research Fellow which he attained in 1995.

The award of an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Prize in 1996 began Arduengo's transition back into academe.

The one year Humboldt award was spent in Braunschweig, Germany at the Technical University.

On return to DuPont, Arduengo maintained a guest Professor appointment in Braunschweig, and in 1999 also made the transition to academe in the U.S. with his assumption of the Saxon Chair in Chemistry at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Arduengo's research interests focus largely on the chemistry of new or unusual bonding arrangements, and unusual valency.

As a graduate student in the Burgess group, his research involved organo-main group element chemistry, specifically, thiocarbonyl ylides, and low-coordinate hypervalent sulfur compounds.

With some re-engineering, the car was later fitted to run on alternate fuels including alcohol and hydrogen (which would foretell Arduengo's professional research involvement with President Bush's 2003 National Hydrogen Fuel Initiative (HFI) and United States Department of Energy's Chemical Hydrogen Storage Program by more than 30 years).

Arduengo attended Bouldercrest and Meadowview Elementary Schools, and Walker High School.

He retired from teaching in 2018 and is now Professor of the Practice in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Saxon Chair Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Alabama, and holds a position as adjunct professor at the Technische Universität in Braunschweig, Germany.