Marjorie Constance Caserio

Marjorie Constance Caserio (née Beckett; February 26, 1929 – April 19, 2021) was an English chemist. In 1975, she was awarded the Garvan Medal by the American Chemical Society.

Career Caserio was hired by John D. Roberts for a postdoctoral position at the California Institute of Technology. She spent eight years at Caltech, working on 3- and 4-membered ring compounds, the reactions of alcohols with diazomethane, the hydrolysis of diaryliodonium salts, the deamination of nitrous acid, and benzyne reaction intermediates in nucleophilic aromatic substitution reactions.

She collaborated with Roberts in writing an organic chemistry textbook, Basic Principles of Organic Chemistry, first published in 1964. Notable for its comprehensiveness and then-unusual emphasis on spectroscopy, it proved enormously influential in how the subject was taught. Also working with Roberts was chemist Fred Caserio.

University of California, Irvine In 1964, Caserio was hired as the second faculty member in chemistry at the brand new University of California, Irvine. At UC Irvine she worked on addition reactions in allenes and bonding and reactions of sulfur compounds. She was one of the first scientists to employ nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the kinetics and mechanisms of these organic reactions, and ion cyclotron resonance to study gas-phase reactions. Caserio became a full professor at UC Irvine in 1972, and chair of the chemistry department in 1987.

Personal life and death In 1957, she married Fred Caserio; she became a US citizen the same year. They had two sons.