Isaiah Shavitt

Who was Isaiah Shavitt?

Isaiah Shavitt was a Polish-born Israeli and American theoretical chemist.

He was born Isaiah Kruk on July 29, 1925 in Kutno, Poland but his family moved to what would become Israel in 1929 . After undergraduate degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering from the Technion in Haifa, he started a Ph.D. in experimental physical chemistry, but shortly after traveled to Cambridge University on a British Council Scholarship and completed his Ph.D. under the aegis of pioneering computational chemist S. Francis Boys.

Following postdoctoral work with Joseph O. Hirschfelder, a stint as a temporary assistant professor at Brandeis University, and further postdoctoral research with Martin Karplus, he became a professor at his alma mater in 1962. In 1967 he moved to a senior research position at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, United States. In 1968 he also became a part-time faculty member at the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State University and moved there full-time in 1981. In 1994 he retired from this position and continued part-time as an Emeritus Professor. Until his death he was also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.