Corwin Hansch

Corwin Herman Hansch (October 6, 1918 – May 8, 2011) was a professor of chemistry at Pomona College in California. He became known as the 'father of computer-assisted molecule design.'

Education and career Hansch was born on October 6, 1918, in Kenmare, North Dakota. He earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1940 and a PhD from New York University in 1944. He briefly worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Hansch worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and as a group leader at DuPont Nemours in Richland, Washington. In February 1946 he received an academic position at Pomona College, where he taught until 1988. Hansch completed sabbaticals at ETH Zurich with Vladimir Prelog and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) with Rolf Huisgen.

He is also noted for the Hansch equation, which is used in Multivariate Statistics - Multivariate statistics is a set of statistical tools to analyse data (e.g., chemical and biological) matrices using regression and/or pattern recognition techniques. Hansch Analysis - Hansch analysis is the investigation of the quantitative relationship between the biological activity of a series of compounds and their physicochemical substituent or global parameters representing hydrophobic, electronic, steric and other effects using multiple regression correlation methodology. Hansch-Fujita constant - The Hansch-Fujita constant describes the contribution of a substituent to the lipophilicity of a compound.

Research Interests: Organic Chemistry; Interaction of organic chemicals with living organisms, Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSAR).

Fragment based regression analysis for quantitative structure-activity relationship (Hansch-analysis)

Death He died of pneumonia on May 8, 2011, in Claremont, California, at 92.

Among his students at Pomona was Jennifer Doudna, co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doudna has credited Hansch as an influence.