Corwin Herman Hansch (October 6, 1918 – May 8, 2011) was a professor of chemistry at Pomona College in California. He became known as the 'father of computer-assisted molecule design.'
Education and career
Hansch was born on October 6, 1918, in Kenmare, North Dakota. He earned a BS from the University of Illinois in 1940 and a PhD from New York University in 1944. He briefly worked as a postdoc at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Hansch worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and as a group leader at DuPont Nemours in Richland, Washington. In February 1946 he received an academic position at Pomona College, where he taught until 1988. Hansch completed sabbaticals at ETH Zurich with Vladimir Prelog and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) with Rolf Huisgen.
He is also noted for the Hansch equation, which is used in
- Multivariate Statistics - Multivariate statistics is a set of statistical tools to analyse data (e.g., chemical and biological) matrices using regression and/or pattern recognition techniques.
- Hansch Analysis - Hansch analysis is the investigation of the quantitative relationship between the biological activity of a series of compounds and their physicochemical substituent or global parameters representing hydrophobic, electronic, steric and other effects using multiple regression correlation methodology.
- Hansch-Fujita <math>\pi</math> constant - The Hansch-Fujita <math>\pi</math> constant describes the contribution of a substituent to the lipophilicity of a compound.
Research Interests:
Organic Chemistry; Interaction of organic chemicals with living organisms, Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSAR).
- Fragment based regression analysis for quantitative structure-activity relationship (Hansch-analysis)
Death
He died of pneumonia on May 8, 2011, in Claremont, California, at 92.
Among his students at Pomona was Jennifer Doudna, co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doudna has credited Hansch as an influence.
Bibliography
A preliminary search in WorldCat and in PubMed, two among many relevant bibliographic and citation indexes, shows the following:
- Books: WorldCat shows "53 works in 204 publications in 4 languages and 2,004 library holdings" for Hansch as "author, editor, other". The top item in the list is "Exploring QSAR" by Corwin Hansch, Albert Leo and David Hoekman, an ACS professional reference book in 28 editions published between 1995 and 2014.
- Journal articles: 281 Pubmed records
- Reviews: authored 33 reviews as indexed in Pubmed
- Title word search: 56 Pubmed records
The Pomona College Archives holds reprints of Hansch's articles published between 1962 and 2009 in addition to other materials.