William D. Jones

William D. Jones was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1953, and was inspired to work in inorganic chemistry as an undergraduate researcher with Mark S. Wrighton at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S., 1975). He obtained a Ph.D. degree in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (1979), working with Robert G. Bergman and completing his final year at Berkeley. He moved to the University of Wisconsin as an NSF postdoctoral fellow with Chuck Casey, and in 1980 accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1987, and is now the Charles F. Houghton Professor of Chemistry. Professor Jones has received several awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1984), a Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award (1985), a Royal Society Guest Research Fellowship (1988), a Fulbright-Hays Scholar (1988),  the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry (2003), and an ACS Cope Scholar Award (2009). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009), and a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (2010). He also has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 2003. Professor Jones’ research interests include organometallic research in strong C-X bond cleavage, catalysis, model studies, mechanisms, kinetics, thermodynamics, and synthetic applications.