Edward Malcolm Kosower (February 2, 1929 – April 7 2022) was an American-Israeli chemist. Kosower was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 2, 1929 and attended high school at Stuyvesant, where he was a classmate of fellow chemist Andrew Streitwieser. He received his B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948 and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1952 under the mentorship of

Saul Winstein Saul Winstein (October 8, 1912 – November 23, 1969) was a Jewish Canadian chemist who discovered the '' Winstein reaction.'' He argued a non-classical cation was needed to explain the stability of the norbornyl cation. This fueled a debat ...

. After postdoctoral research at Basel with Cyril Grob, and then at Harvard with Frank Westheimer, he began his independent career as assistant professor at Lehigh University (1954) and the University of Wisconsin (1956). In 1961, he moved to Stony Brook University as associate professor where he was later promoted to full professor. In 1972, he moved to Tel Aviv University, where he was named the Josef Kryss Professor of Biophysical Organic Chemistry in 1992. He was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1977 to 1978, and is a member of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

. He is best known for his earlier work in

physical organic chemistry Physical organic chemistry, a term coined by Louis Hammett in 1940, refers to a discipline of organic chemistry that focuses on the relationship between chemical structures and reactivity, in particular, applying experimental tools of physical c ...

and later work in biophysical chemistry. In particular, he developed the ''Z'' scale for solvent polarity based on the

solvatochromic In chemistry, solvatochromism is the phenomenon observed when the colour due to a solute is different when that solute is dissolved in different solvents. The solvatochromic effect is the way the spectrum of a substance (the solute) varies when th ...

effect for

zwitterionic In chemistry, a zwitterion ( ; ), also called an inner salt or dipolar ion, is a molecule that contains an equal number of positively- and negatively-charged functional groups. : With amino acids, for example, in solution a chemical equilibrium wil ...

dyes and investigated bimane dyes as fluorescent labels. Kosower is the author of an early textbook on physical organic chemistry, ''An Introduction to Physical Organic Chemistry'' (Wiley, 1968), and joined Streitwieser and Heathcock as coauthor of the 4th edition of their influential textbook, ''Introduction to Organic Chemistry'' (Macmillan, 1992).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kosower, Edward 1929 births 2022 deaths 21st-century American chemists Israeli chemists Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni University of California, Los Angeles alumni People from Brooklyn