Weston T. Borden

Weston Thatcher Borden (born 1943) is an American chemist with research interests in computational chemistry, organic chemistry, and organometallic chemistry. He is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in chemistry at the University of North Texas, where he was formerly Welch Chair and professor of computational chemistry. He previously taught for many years at the University of Washington.

Early life and education Weston Borden was born in 1943 in New York City, the son of Martin L. Borden and Doris Weston, who was a singer and a Hollywood star in the 1930s. He earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, where his Ph.D. dissertation was titled "Electronic structure and geometrical isomerism in allene; some new synthetic routes to an optically active allene". As a graduate student, he studied theoretical chemistry at Cambridge University for a year. He was a member of the Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Modeling, located at the University of North Texas, and from 1999 was associate editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Awards Borden has been awarded fellowships by the Sloan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, among others.

Personal life Borden and his wife Sheila, also a chemist, have endowed lecture series at the University of Washington (in 2015) and at the University of North Texas (in 2005, in honor of Ernest Davidson).

Selected publications Modern Molecular Orbital Theory for Organic Chemists. Prentice-Hall, 1975. . (Ed.) Diradicals. Wiley, 1982. . "Diradicals". . In: Encyclopedia of Computational Chemistry. Wiley, 2002. .