Save the Date:
Wednesday, October 22nd
Location – look for the Constant Contact Email
Braude Awardee:
Dr. Thomas Leckta
of Johns Hopkins University
“Spanning a spectrum of organofluorine chemistry brightened by undergradresearchers: from fluoronium ions to large fragment deactivation site-selectivity”
Biography
Thomas Lectka is the Jean and Norman Scowe Professor of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins. A native of Detroit, he received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1985 and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1990. In 1991-1992 he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and from 1992-1994 he was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Prof. Lectka joined the Hopkins faculty in 1994 as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, and was promoted to professor in 2002. During his time at Hopkins, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Sloan and Dreyfus foundations among others, and was Maryland ACS Chemist of the Year in 2017; he won a Dean’s Award for teaching in 2018, was an ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar in 2024 and an ACS Fellow in 2025. Among his most notable scientific contributions are the discovery of metal-catalyzed amide isomerization; the development of the first practical method for the catalytic, asymmetric synthesis of beta-lactams; asymmetric alpha-fluorination and metal-catalyzed alkane fluorination; the first examples of a symmetrical fluoronium ion in solution; directed, catalyzed and promoted radical-based fluorination; and the use of metal-binding fragment deactivation to direct the site-selective derivatization of complex molecules.