About Robert Burns Woodward
Robert Burns Woodward was an American organic chemist. He is considered by many to be the preeminent synthetic organic chemist of the twentieth century, having made many key contributions to the subject, especially in the synthesis of complex natural products and the determination of their molecular structure. He worked closely with Roald Hoffmann on theoretical studies of chemical reactions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965. The first major contribution of Woodward's career in the early 1940s was a series of papers describing the application of ultraviolet spectroscopy in the elucidation of the structure of natural products. Woodward was perhaps the first synthetic organic chemist who used these ideas as a predictive framework in synthesis. Only one year later, MIT awarded him the doctorate, when his classmates were still graduating with their bachelor's degrees.
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