Jerrold Meinwald

Jerrold Meinwald, the Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Cornell, died
peacefully of cancer Monday in Ithaca. He was 91.
Born in New York City to Herman Meinwald and Sophie Baskin Meinwald in 1927, he
graduated from Stuyvesant High School, and briefly attended Brooklyn College and Queens
College. After serving in the US Navy as an electronics technician (1945-46), Meinwald earned a
Ph.B. (1947) and B.S. (1948) in Chemistry at the University of Chicago, and an M.A. (1950) and
Ph.D. (1952) at Harvard, where he worked with R.B. Woodward. In 1952 he came to Cornell,
where he spent most of his subsequent career. He was named Goldwin Smith Professor of
Chemistry (1980-2005) and held the Andrew Mellon Foundation Professorship (1993-95).
Meinwald trained generations of chemists and produced over 400 journal articles with some 200
collaborators. He lectured frequently, including at five national organic symposia of the
American Chemical Society. His research covered a broad range of topics, including molecular
rearrangement mechanisms, the synthesis and reactions of highly strained ring systems, organic
photochemistry, natural product structure and synthesis, and anesthetic stereochemistry. His
earliest long-term chemical collaborator was his first wife, Yvonne Chu Meinwald. Also of note
was his fifty-year partnership with entomologist Thomas Eisner: they first investigated
chemical defense and communication mechanisms in the insect world, and later went on to
various other animals and plants. This work proved pioneering in the new field of Chemical
Ecology. In the early 1970s, Meinwald was a founding Research Director of the International
Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya.
Meinwald's research has been nationally and internationally recognized. He was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences (1969), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1970,
serving as secretary from 2005-2016), and the American Philosophical Society (1987). He was an
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow (1958-62) and twice a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
Fellow (1960-61 and 1976-77). He received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Gé