Stanley G. Smith

Stanley G. Smith, 78, an emeritus professor of chemistry and chemical education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, died on June 1, after a three-year battle with cancer.

Smith received a B.S. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1953. He then served in the Army for two years before earning a Ph.D. in chemistry at UCLA under Saul Winstein in 1959.

Smith joined the faculty of the chemistry department at the University of Illinois in 1960. Within a few years, he began seminal studies on the mechanism of Grignard, organolithium, and lithium aluminum hydride addition to carbonyl compounds, which he accomplished by developing a scanning infrared stopped-flow spectrometer. Smith also carried out mechanistic studies on the addition of copper reagents to unsaturated ketones and on solvolyses, alkylation, photochemical, rearrangement, and elimination reactions.

In 1968, Smith began researching the use of computers in chemical education and published a groundbreaking paper in the Journal of Chemical Education on the use of computers in teaching organic chemistry (1970, 47, 608). His work and programs helped support widespread integration of computer-based technologies in instruction in general and organic chemistry.

Smith was appointed Jubilee Professor in the university’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences in 1990 and its first Murchison-Mallory Chair in Chemistry in 1995. He retired in 2006 but continued to assist the chemistry department and the Chemistry Learning Center, a facility that he founded in 1972.

Smith received the Chemical Manufacturing Association Catalyst Award in 1987, the IBM/EDUCOM Robinson Award in 1992, ACS’s George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education in 1998, and numerous higher education software awards from EDUCOM/ENCRIPTAL. Smith was a fellow of the Sloan Foundation and of the Association for the Development of Computer-Based Instruction. He was a member of ACS, which he joined in 1954.