The guy seems to have a near photographic memory for the lit, too. I can’t say enough good about Jack.

The ferrocene and manganese chemistry was working really well when Bossman walked up and said “How would you like to try some acene chemistry.” I figured he meant try something that one of the guys who recently graduated had abandoned. I figure it would crap out and the whole thing would die, because I figured the guys before me had beaten that stuff to death. Nope. I was constantly busy with something that was working well for the rest of the time I was in grad school. No complaints. Anything that gets you to escape velocity is fine with me. But I wish I had had another year or two. With a wife and son, that wasn’t in the cards.

Another guy in Jack’s group picked up the Mn stuff, and now he’s a prof at WKU.

I had the luxury in graduate school to work in two groups, one organic materials and one organometallic. Since my advisor was untenured at the time, I had to have a tenured co-advisor. I think in most cases at my alma mater, this is purely a formality, but my projects had enough overlap that I got to do some real organometallic work.

The pentacene stuff killed off some really neat projects and brought my organometallic work to an abrupt halt. I made some really nifty 1,2 disubstituted ferrocenes, really cool compounds by 2 different and interesting routes, that never made it into print, which is one of my only regrets from grad school. There was not an obvious heir to my work when I left, so it just sits, waiting for someone to love it…and to interpret my awful organometallic lab notebook (which is another regret…)