John F. Hartwig is the Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Hartwig received his A. B. degree from Princeton and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Subsequently, he was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined the Yale University faculty in 1992, and joined the University of Illinois chemistry faculty in July 2006. Professor Hartwig's research focuses on the discovery and mechanistic understanding of organic reactions catalyzed by organometallic complexes. He was one of the originators of palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions to form carbon-heteroatom bonds, as well as palladium-catalyzed coupling of enolates and catalytic functionalization of the terminal C-H bonds in alkanes. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, was the recipient of the 2008 Mukaiyama Award from the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan, the 2008 International Catalysis Award from the International Association of Catalysis Societies, the 2008 Paul N. Rylander Award of the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society, the 2007 Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award in Organic Synthesis, the 2007 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, and the 2006 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry.