NORMAN SCOWE (pictured as a student), Engr 1927, and his wife, JEAN SCOWE, were both longtime and generous friends of the university. Mr. Scowe served as chairman, president, and director of Mineral Pigments Corporation, American Chemical & Pigments Corporation, and Rockwood Industries. He died in 1986. Jean Scowe died a year later, leaving the bulk of her estate to the School of Medicine for cancer research and teaching in memory of her friend J. Earl Moore, Med 1916, a Hopkins physician.
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Jean and Norman Scowe Professorship in Chemistry
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Established in 1987 by the estate of Norman Scowe
Held by Thomas Lectka
THOMAS LECTKA, the Jean and Norman Scowe Professor of Chemistry, is a chemist who specializes in the areas of catalysis in synthetic and mechanistic organic chemistry. Dr. 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. He was also the Western Hemisphere editor of Tetrahedron Reports from 2007-2011.
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; and metal-catalyzed alkane fluorination.
Dr. Lectka received his BA from Oberlin College in 1985 and PhD from Cornell University in 1990. In 1991 he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and from 1992-1994 he was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.