Anthony M. Trozzolo

Biographical Information

Anthony M. Trozzolo is the Charles L. Huisking Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Notre Dame. He received his B. S. degree in chemistry from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1950 and the M. S. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1957 and 1960, respectively. In 1959, he became a Member of the Technical Staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he remained until 1975 when he became the first Huisking Professor of Chemistry at Notre Dame.

Dr. Trozzolo has served as a visiting professor at Columbia University (1971), at the University of Colorado (1981), the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven, Belgium (1983), and the Max Planck Institute for Strahlenchemie in Mulheim/Ruhr, Germany (1990). He was also an invited guest lecturer of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen-Nikolausberg, Germany (1978, 1982, 1983) and the Academia Sinica at its Institutes in Beijing, Hefei, Dalien, and Shanghai in 1984 and 1985. He was the founder and first Chairman of the Gordon Research Conference on Organic Photochemistry in 1964 and served as Chairman of the Section of Chemical Sciences of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1969 and 1970.

Professor Trozzolo's research interests have been primarily in the creation and detection of reactive intermediates. The methodology often involves low-temperature photochemistry or solid-state photochemistry. Among the intermediates studied are carbenes, azomethine ylides (from aziridines), carbonyl ylides (from oxiranes), and nitrenes (from azides). The detection techniques include e.p.r. spectroscopy, laser spectroscopy, and optical spectroscopy. In addition , Dr. Trozzolo has also conducted research in the following fields: photostabilization of polymers, dye lasers, singlet molecular oxygen, charge-transfer complexes, molecular magnets, and superconducting intercalation complexes.

In addition to his technical publications, Dr. Trozzolo has been issued 31 U. S. and foreign patents. He has delivered over 300 invited lectures at universities, international meetings, American Chemical Society symposia, and industrial laboratories. Among these were endowed lectureships at universities including the Phillips Lecturer at the University of Oklahoma (1971), Peter C. Reilly Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame (1972), Cecil L. Brown Lecturer at Rutgers (1975), Sigma Xi Lecturer at Bowling Green (1976), Michael Faraday Lecturer at Northern Illinois University (1976), F.O. Butler Lecturer at South Dakota State University (1978), Sigma Xi Lecturer at Abbott Labs (1978), Chevron Lecturer at the University of Nevada-Reno (1983), College of Science Distinguished Lecturer at Notre Dame (1986), Hesburgh Alumni Lecturer (1986), and the John C. Crano lecturer at the Univ. of Akron (2000). Dr. Trozzolo received the St. Joseph Valley ACS Section Award in 1979 and the Gregory and Freda Halpern Award in Photochemistry of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1980. The title of "Honorary Citizen" was conferred on him in 1997 by the Italian town of Castrolibero, Calabria (where his parents and brothers were born) and he was also the first recipient of the Pietro Bucci Prize (1997) co-sponsored by the Italian Chemical Society and the University of Calabria. The largest Italian American service organization, UNICO National, presented him with their 2008 Marconi Science Award. Recently, he received the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus Award for Professional Achievement from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the 2012 Distinguished Alumnus Award for Professional Achievement from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Trozzolo is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1963), the American Institute of Chemists (1962), the New York Academy of Sciences (1967), and the Inter-American Photochemical Society (2000). He recently became a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (2011) where he has been an active member, serving as National Councilor for both the North Jersey Section (1968-1973) and the Division of Organic Chemistry (1974-1979). He also served as Chairman of the St. Joseph Valley Section (1979), as a member of the ACS Joint Board-Council Committee on Chemistry and Public Affairs (1975-1978), as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (1975-76), as Editor of Chemical Reviews (1977-84), and as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Accounts of Chemical Research (1977-85). In 1988, Dr. Trozzolo was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences. In recent years, Dr. Trozzolo created a new course for non-science majors entitled: "Seeing the Light in Science" where the focus was on the many facets of light in everyday phenomena. He was Assistant Dean of the College of Science at Notre Dame (1993-98). He has been a member of the Faculty Senate for many years representing the Emeritus Faculty, and in 2010 became the first octogenarian to serve in the Senate. An oral history interview appeared in The Spectrum.

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