In Memoriam: UC Davis Collaborator Professor Makhlouf J. Haddadin

Professor Makhlouf J. Haddadin, American University of Beirut (AUB) – a two decades long collaborator of UC Davis Prof. Mark Kurth – passed away on 21-Sept-2022 in Amman, Jordan. He received a B.Sc. in 1957 from AUB and continued to get his MS degree at AUB working for Prof. Costas Issidorides (who was also a visiting lecturer at UC Davis). Makhluf did his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry with Prof. Alfred Hassner at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1962) and then went to Harvard University for a two years Postdoctoral study with Prof. Louis Fieser. Dr. Haddadin joined the faculty at AUB in 1965 where he spent his entire professional career.

Prof. Haddadin, in collaboration with Prof. Kurth, discovered the “Davis-Beirut Reaction”. Together, Haddadin and Kurth have published ~20 papers on this chemistry, starting in 2005. In the first six papers, the reaction had no name. Then, in the seventh paper, Haddadin and Kurth proposed the “Davis-Beirut” name “in recognition of the merits of international collaboration.” The reviewers accepted the text for publication in the American Chemical Society’s Organic Letters (Dec. 22, 2010) and thereby accepted the reaction’s name — which would appear in the title of their eighth paper on this chemistry published on May 25, 2011 (and all subsequent papers on this chemistry). In 2019, a review of the Davis-Beirut Reaction was published in Accounts of Chemical Research (2019), 52, 2256-2265 – “Davis-Beirut Reaction: Diverse Chemistries of Highly Reactive Nitroso Intermediates in Heterocycle Synthesis” by Zhu, Jie S.; Haddadin, Makhluf J.; Kurth, Mark J.

Professor Haddadin was a true gentleman – a creative chemist – a wonderful person.