The Department of Chemistry is fortunate to receive generous sponsorship from a number of individuals and corporations, whose support makes it possible to host the following talks.
Visit the A.R. Gordon Distinguished Lecture area of our website to learn more about our flagship lecture series.
About our Named Lectureships
About the Peter Yates Lecture
Peter Yates was a leading professor at U of T and all of Canada in the area of structural organic chemistry.
Educated in England, Yates did a postdoctoral fellowship with R. B. Woodward at Harvard, going on to accept an offer to be a professor at Harvard.
Professor Yates was a very popular research mentor and teacher at Harvard, with many notable students. After a few years at Harvard, he moved to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto where he informally led the organic/biological chemistry faculty team for decades.
Over the years of his career, students in the Peter Yates lab group produced many new compounds that were stored in his labs on the fifth floor of Lash Miller. After his passing, Professors Ron Kluger and Mark Lautens of the Department of Chemistry contacted chemists at FMC, an agrichemicals company, and exchanged the compounds and notes on their creation for funds which, along with donations from others in Yates's memory, were used to establish the Yates lectureship. Further donations in his memory continue to this day.
The first Peter Yates Lectures were given by Professor Samuel Danishefsky, a leader in carbohydrate chemistry, who had received his PhD with Professor Yates at Harvard in 1962.