Yehuda Mazur OBM, April 18, 1925 -- April 25, 2004

Obituary of Prof. Yehuda Mazur

Department of Organic Chemistry
The Weizmann Institute of Science
76100 Rehovot, Israel

[Prof. Mazur passed away on
April 25, 2004; 4 Iyar (Yom haZikaron) 5764].

Update June 8, 2004:
Obituary in the Haaretz daily newspaper

Prof. Yehuda Mazur, of blessed memory, was born in Lodz, Poland, on April 18, 1925. He immigrated to Israel in 1939, and finished high school at the "Balfour Gymnasium" in Tel-Aviv. From 1942 until 1947, he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, majoring in chemistry and minoring in physics. In 1947, he was granted the M.Sc. degree for a thesis entitled "On nitrogen derivatives of phenanthrene" (supervised by Prof. Moshe Weizmann, brother of Institute founder Chaim Weizmann). After army service during the War of Independence (1947-1949), he pursued doctoral studies with Prof. Leopold Ruzicka (1939 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic (ETH Zürich), and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1952 for a thesis entitled "Contribution to the knowledge of elemadienolic acid".

Following a brief research assistantship at the Royal School of Science and Technology in Glasgow, UK, he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science faculty in 1954, being promoted to Senior Scientist in 1959, to Associate Professor in 1963, and to Full Professor in 1976. He held the Rebecca and Israel Sieff Chair in Organic Chemistry from 1973 until his Emeritate in 1995. Prof. Mazur OBM served as Acting Head of the Department or Organic Chemistry from 1960 until 1962, and Head of the Department from 1979 until 1990. In 1988, he briefly served as acting Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry.

He was a visiting fellow at the School for Advanced Study, MIT in 1959--1960, and a visiting professor at the University Chemical Laboratory (Cambridge, UK) in 1965, at the ETH Zürich in 1966 and 1972, at the University of Minnesota in 1978, at the Université Paris-Sud in 1984, and Australian National University (Canberra, ACT) in 1986. He published about 250 papers in scholarly journals. Several of his former students serve on the faculty of universities in Israel and abroad.

Prof. Mazur z"l is survived by his spouse, Mrs. Fanny Mazur, and by their children.

Yehi zikhro barukh/May his memory be blessed.

This file was last modified on Tuesday, 08-Jun-2004 18:23:48 IDT.

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