Trustees create two new Science professorships

The Purdue University Board of Trustees approved the creation of two new Science professorships at its meeting on June 2: Joseph S. Francisco as the William E. Moore Distinguished Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Science and Chemistry; Philip L. Fuchs as the Richard B. Wetherill Professor of Chemistry.

Francisco has been a professor at Purdue since 1995. He holds a joint appointment in chemistry and earth and atmospheric sciences. Prior to coming to Purdue, he was on the faculty at Wayne State University from 1986 to 1994.

In 1993 he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and worked at the jet propulsion laboratory at California Institute of Technology. In 1998 he was appointed the Sterling A. Brown Visiting Professor at Williams College. In addition, he received the Alexander von Humboldt Award for U.S. Senior Sciences and spent 2003 in Germany and 2004 in Italy as visiting senior fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna.

He is widely known for his work in computational atmospheric chemistry, with expertise in chemistry, atmospheric science and numerical modeling. His research focuses on basic studies in spectroscopy, kinetics and atmospheric pollutants.

Among his honors are a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award, the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers Outstanding Teacher Award and the Percy Julian Award for outstanding contributions to fundamental research. He also is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Francisco received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1977 from the University of Texas at Austin. He earned a doctorate in chemical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. His postdoctoral work included a research fellowship at Cambridge University and a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT.

The William E. Moore professorship is named for the first African-American to receive a doctorate from Purdue's chemistry department. Moore received his bachelor's degree from Southern University in 1963 and his doctorate from Purdue in physical biochemistry in 1967. He went on to hold faculty and administrative positions at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas, Texas Southern University in Houston. He was appointed chairman of the General Research Support Review Committee at the National Institutes of Health and was selected as one of five editors of the first proceedings of the White House Conference on Science and Technology for Minorities.

Fuchs is an organic chemistry professor and has been on Purdue's faculty since 1973. He previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Nobel Laureate Elias James Corey at Harvard University.
Fuchs is internationally regarded as a leading figure in synthetic organic chemistry. His research focuses on the use of strategies employing organosulfur chemistry to promote efficiency in combination with computer-based evaluation of potential anticancer agents.

His awards and honors include an Eli Lilly Young Faculty Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, a Pioneer in Laboratory Robotics Award and a Purdue McCoy Research Award in 2003. He was voted by his undergraduate students as one of top 10 teachers in Purdue's College of Science for four separate years. Fuchs has consulted for Pfizer Inc. and Eli Lilly and Co., served on the editorial board of The Journal of Organic Chemistry and is an executive editor for the Electronic Encyclopedia of Organic Reagents, an online dynamic database.

Fuchs earned his bachelor's degree in 1968 and a doctorate in chemistry with Edwin Vedejs in 1971, both from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Richard B. Wetherill, for whom the professorship is named, was a broadly recognized surgeon and lecturer born in Lafayette, Ind., in 1859. Wetherill left a large bequest to Purdue for the creation of a chemistry building, which was named the Wetherill Chemistry Laboratory.