Prof. GB Hammond

Gerald B. (GB) Hammond, Ph.D., ACS Fellow

Professor Hammond holds the Endowed Chair in Organic Chemistry from the University of Louisville. He was born in Lima, Perú, received his B.Sc. from the Universidad Católica del Perú, his M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia (Canada) and his Ph.D from the University of Birmingham in England. After a stint as postdoctoral fellow and visiting professor at the University of Iowa, Dr. Hammond joined the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 1990 as an assistant professor. In 2004, Dr. Hammond moved to the University of Louisville as Senior Professor of Chemistry and University Scholar. From 2007 to 2009 he was program director in the Chemistry Division at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington, D.C. and has held an expert appointment in the NSF in 2014 and 2017. Professor Hammond has also held visiting professorships at Heidelberg University (Germany), Harvard University and Virginia Tech (USA), Okayama University (Japan), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Unicamp (Brazil), the University of Valencia (Spain) and was recently awarded a Jose Tola Pasquel Endowed Professorship at the Pontificial Universidad Católica del Perú (www.pucp.edu.pe). Professor Hammond has been adjunct professor at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Perú since 1989 and was Chair of the Fluorine Division of the American Chemical Society in 2004.

Dr. Hammond has received the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Dreyfus Scholar-Fellow award, and the UMass Dartmouth Scholar of the Year Award. Professor Hammond was also awarded a Mercator Professorship by the German Research Foundation, he received a Career Achievement Award from the University of Louisville in 2011, and was twice named Fulbright Scholar, most recently, a Distinguished Fulbright Chair in Brazil. In 2015, Professor Hammond was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences of Perú, in 2017 he was elected Fellow of the American Chemical Society, and, in 2019, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Award in Fluorine Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

Professor Hammond is author of 195 publications and 13 patents, and has received over $14 million dollars in grants as principal or co-investigator. He has presented his work in over 250 international conferences, symposia and university lectures. Collectively, his students have won over 35 national and regional awards. His current research interests include the search for new synthetic methodologies in organofluorine chemistry, new approaches to catalysis, and green chemistry.

In 2017, Dr. Hammond co-founded Faster Chemistry LLC, a chemical applications company

For more information about joining the Hammond group, please email Prof. Hammond