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Corwin Hansch
American pharmacologist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Corwin Herman Hansch (October 6, 1918 – May 8, 2011)[2] was a professor of chemistry at Pomona College in California. He became known as the 'father of computer-assisted molecule design.'[3]
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Education and career
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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.[4][5] Hansch completed sabbaticals at ETH Zurich with Vladimir Prelog and at University of Munich with Rolf Huisgen.[6]
Hansch taught Organic Chemistry for many years at Pomona College, and was known for giving complex lectures without using notes. His course in Physical Bio-Organic Medicinal Chemistry was ground-breaking at an undergraduate level.
Hansch may be best known as the father of the concept of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR), the quantitative correlation of the physicochemical properties of molecules with their biological activities.[7]
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 constant - The Hansch-Fujita 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)
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Death
He died of pneumonia on May 8, 2011, in Claremont, California, at 92.[2]
Notes
His research group at Pomona College worked on QSAR studies and in building and expanding the database of chemical and physical data as C-QSAR and Bioloom. His postgraduate associates were Rajni Garg, Cynthia R. D. Selassie, Suresh Babu Mekapati, and Alka Kurup.
The Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design carried four obituaries (as found in a Pubmed personal subject [ps] search).[8][9][10][6]
Among his students at Pomona was Jennifer Doudna, co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doudna has credited Hansch as an influence.[11]
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".[12] 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[13]
- Reviews: authored 33 reviews as indexed in Pubmed[14]
- Title word search: 56 Pubmed records[15]
The Pomona College Archives holds reprints of Hansch's articles published between 1962 and 2009 in addition to other materials.[3]
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References
External links
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