About Bruce E. Bursten
Bruce E. Bursten was born in Chicago in 1954 and was brought up in Milwaukee. He received his S.B. in Chemistry with Honors from the University of Chicago in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1978 under the direction of Professor Richard F. Fenske. From 1978-1980, Professor Bursten was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas A&M University, conducting research with Professor F. Albert Cotton. He joined the faculty of Ohio State University in 1980 as Assistant Professor of Chemistry and was named Distinguished University Professor in 1997. In October 1999, he became Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State, a position he held until October 2003. He began his appointment as Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee on September 1, 2005.
Professor Bursten has earned numerous honors for his academic accomplishments and leadership ability. He received a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award in 1984; the OSU Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1982 and 1996; the OSU Distinguished Scholar Award in 1990; the 2001 American Chemistry Council’s Catalyst Award, a national award for teachers of chemistry; the OSU Faculty Award for Distinguished University Service in 2002; the 2003 Spiers Medal and Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom; and the 2005 Morley Medal from the American Chemical Society Cleveland Section. Professor Bursten was named a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1985 and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004. He has also been elected to several offices in the American Chemical Society Division of Inorganic Chemistry and served as Chair of the Division in 2001. Having been chosen president-elect in January 2007, he began serving a one-year term as president of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in January 2008. With over 160,000 members, the ACS is the world’s largest scientific organization.
Professor Bursten conducts research in inorganic chemistry, focusing on the correlation of theoretical and experimental electronic structural data with the bonding and reactivity patterns of metal-containing molecules. He is the author or co-author of more than 140 research papers and has presented more than 130 research seminars at national laboratories, companies, and other universities. He is also a co-author of one of the leading textbooks in general chemistry.