Herbert Mayr

Herbert Mayr received his doctoral degree under Rolf Huisgen in 1974. After postdoctoral work with George A. Olah he joined Paul von R. Schleyer's group in Erlangen in 1976 to start his independent research. After professorships at the Universities of Luebeck (1984) and Darmstadt (1991) he moved to the University of Muenchen (LMU) in 1996. Mayr is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy Leopoldina. He received many awards, most recently (2020) the James-Flack-Norris Award for Physical Organic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society.

Mayr developed the most comprehensive presently available nucleophilicity and electrophilicity scales, which can be used for planning organic syntheses, modelling carbocationic polymerizations, and elucidating reaction mechanisms. Examples for the latter aspect are the demonstration that the Reactivity Selectivity Principle cannot be a general rule and the use of Marcus theory for predicting ambident nucleophilicity.