Pushing Electrons

Daniel Weeks is a native of New Jersey. He earned a B.S. in chemistry at Wesleyan College in West Virginia, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Delaware. After a post-doctoral year at Brown University he began to learn his craft during a temporary appointment at Haverford College. He taught at Seton Hall University for about 20 years and finished his career with ten delightful years at Northwestern University. While he published research on the mechanisms of hydrolysis of organic compounds in aqueous solutions, mostly in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, his greatest satisfaction came from "seeing the light go on in his students' eyes." He has a reputation as an informative, entertaining and even funny lecturer. He is a self-confessed "ham" who always remembered that although what he taught was old stuff to him it was new to his students.

Lewis structures; molecules and functional groups; ions; free radicals; answers; resonance structures; simple ions; free radicals; benzene and benzenoid aromatic compounds; more complicated ions; molecules having resonance structures with charge separation; answers; mechanisms; sigma bond breaking; sigma bond making; simultaneous bond making and breaking; complex mechanisms; rearrangements; ring closures; some reactions from biochemistry; answers; on solving mechanism problems; some reactions from biochemistry; answers; simple reactions; enzymes; co-enzymes; answers.