The Oral History Project of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, led by Charles Wilcox and Kelly Strickland, presents this DVD of an extended interview with a senior member of the faculty in which they share their life?s journey, their professional interests and their reflections about the distinctive character of their department and its nurturing environment. Their comments reveal some of the aspects that make this an exemplary academic unit. Short biographies of interviewee and interviewer are included, in addition to a photo gallery and list of publications of the interviewee.

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia University and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

"Applied theoretical chemistry" is the way Roald Hoffmann likes to characterize the particular blend of computations stimulated by experiment and the construction of generalized models, of frameworks for understanding, that is his contribution to chemistry.