Three more profs join Chem Dept.

The hirings signify a welcome success for the Chemistry Department, which has attempted to recruit senior faculty from other universities for the past three years and has been plagued by a slim full-time staff. Gary Molander, a senior professor, and Patrick Walsh and Feng Gai, both assistant professors, will join Virgil Percec, a senior professor who was hired last February in the understaffed, approximately 30-member department. Molander, Gai and Percec will begin teaching in the spring, while Walsh will start immediately. "This completes most of the outstanding recruitment," Balamuth said, adding that the additions should improve the range of research activities within the Chemistry Department. Chemistry Department Vice Chairperson George Palladino noted yesterday that it is "extremely unusual" to recruit four professors in one year. "We clearly wanted to add more faculty in the area of organic chemistry and that's important to our teaching mission as well as our research mission," Palladino said, pointing out that Percec and Molander will bolster the organic chemistry division, one of the department's disciplines. Molander, an organic chemist from the University of Colorado at Boulder, will teach an undergraduate course this spring after settling in at the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories with the rest of the hires. Molander said he took the position in March, after visiting the University twice and meeting the department head. "As negotiations were underway, I learned that Professors Virgil Percec and Patrick Walsh would be coming -- it turned out to be an incredibly impressive group," Molander said. Gai, a physical chemist who did his postdoctoral work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, will teach a graduate course in the spring. Though he received job offers from Los Alamos and the University of Kansas, Gai said he was drawn to Penn for its prestigious faculty and research facilities. "Penn is a pretty famous place," he said. And Walsh, a cross-disciplinary inorganic and organic chemist formerly at San Diego State University, also said he looks forward to interacting with top-notch students and faculty. "I came from a non-Ph.D.-granting institution," noted Walsh, who will start teaching his first graduate students tomorrow. Penn Chemistry Professor Jeffrey Winkler said that each of the new faculty members specializes in an area that has not had strong representation at the University in past years. "Getting Molander here has been a real coup for the department," Winkler said, pointing to Molander's research in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry. Molander received his doctorate from Purdue University after completing his bachelor's degree at Iowa State University. Gai earned his undergraduate and masters degrees from Peking University. He received his doctorate from Iowa State University. And Walsh performed his doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley and his undergraduate work at the University of California at San Diego. The recruitment efforts will continue this year as the department seeks a senior bio-organic professor.