Corwin Hansch

Hansch was born on October 6, 1918, in Kenmare, North Dakota. He earned a BS from the University of Illinois in 1940 and a PhD from New York University in 1944. He briefly worked as a postdoc at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Hansch worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and as a group leader at DuPont Nemours in Richland, Washington. In February 1946 he received an academic position at Pomona College, where he taught until 1988.^[4][5] Hansch completed sabbaticals at ETH Zurich with Vladimir Prelog and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) with Rolf Huisgen.^[6]

Hansch taught Organic Chemistry for many years at Pomona College, and was known for giving complex lectures without using notes. His course in Physical Bio-Organic Medicinal Chemistry was ground-breaking at an undergraduate level.

Hansch may be best known as the father of the concept of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR), the quantitative correlation of the physicochemical properties of molecules with their biological activities.^[7]

He is also noted for the Hansch equation, which is used in

• Multivariate Statistics - Multivariate statistics is a set of statistical tools to analyse data (e.g., chemical and biological) matrices using regression and/or pattern recognition techniques.
• Hansch Analysis - Hansch analysis is the investigation of the quantitative relationship between the biological activity of a series of compounds and their physicochemical substituent or global parameters representing hydrophobic, electronic, steric and other effects using multiple regression correlation methodology.
• Hansch-Fujita ${\displaystyle \pi }$ constant - The Hansch-Fujita ${\displaystyle \pi }$ constant describes the contribution of a substituent to the lipophilicity of a compound.

Research Interests: Organic Chemistry; Interaction of organic chemicals with living organisms, Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSAR).

• Fragment based regression analysis for quantitative structure-activity relationship (Hansch-analysis)

He died of pneumonia on May 8, 2011, in Claremont, California, at 92.^[2]

His research group at Pomona College worked on QSAR studies and in building and expanding the database of chemical and physical data as C-QSAR and Bioloom. His postgraduate associates were Rajni Garg, Cynthia R. D. Selassie, Suresh Babu Mekapati, and Alka Kurup.

The Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design carried four obituaries (as found in a Pubmed personal subject [ps] search).^{[8][9][10][6]}

Among his students at Pomona was Jennifer Doudna, co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doudna has credited Hansch as an influence.^[11]

A preliminary search in WorldCat and in PubMed, two among many relevant bibliographic and citation indexes, shows the following:

• Books: WorldCat shows "53 works in 204 publications in 4 languages and 2,004 library holdings" for Hansch as "author, editor, other".^[12] The top item in the list is "Exploring QSAR" by Corwin Hansch, Albert Leo and David Hoekman, an ACS professional reference book in 28 editions published between 1995 and 2014.
• Journal articles: 281 Pubmed records^[13]
• Reviews: authored 33 reviews as indexed in Pubmed^[14]
• Title word search: 56 Pubmed records^[15]

The Pomona College Archives holds reprints of Hansch's articles published between 1962 and 2009 in addition to other materials.^[3]

• Hammett equation
• Craig plot
• David Weininger