M. Frederick Hawthorne was born in Fort Scott, Kansas and he received his elementary and secondary education in Kansas and Missouri. Prior to high school graduation, through examination he entered the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, Rolla, Missouri as a chemical engineering student. He then transferred to Pomona College, Claremont, California and received a B.A. degree in chemistry. Hawthorne immediately commenced graduate work in organic chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received his Ph.D. Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa then attracted Hawthorne as a postdoctoral associate (physical-organic chemistry) for a period of sixteen months. He joined the Rohm and Haas Company, Redstone Arsenal Research Division, Huntsville, Alabama as a Senior Research Chemist. Hawthorne launched his career in borane cluster chemistry by organizing and leading the Organometallic Chemistry Group at Rohm and Haas, Redstone. While on leave of absence from Rohm and Haas he served as a Visiting Lecturer in physical-organic chemistry at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hawthorne served as a Laboratory Head at the Rohm and Haas Co., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and in 1962, he became a full Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He transferred to the Los Angeles campus in 1969. In 1998 he was appointed University Professor of Chemistry, the most distinguished title bestowed upon faculty by the Regents of the University of California. Hawthorne joins twenty colleagues sharing this title University-wide. In 2006 Hawthorne retired from UCLA and founded the International Institute of Nano and Molecular Medicine at the University of Missouri, where he is Institute Director and Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Radiology. Hawthorne is the author or co-author of more than 560 research papers, 30 patents and 10 book chapters that reflect the joint efforts of approximately 200 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral associates and 11 Ph.D. coworkers at Rohm and Haas, Redstone. His students and postdoctoral associates represent 21 different countries and 35 of them now occupy academic positions. One of them was a space shuttle astronaut; Anna Lee Fisher (née Sims), M.S. (chemistry), M.D.

Inorganic