Koop Lammertsma
Cornell Visiting Professor
Chemistry & Biochemistry
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Professor Koop Lammertsma received his Master’s Degree in organic chemistry from the University of Groningen, and his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam, both in the Netherlands. After several years of postdoctoral research at University College London, the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, and the University of Southern California, he began his independent career in 1983 at the University of Alabama. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1987, and to Full Professor in 1992. During his appointment at the University of Alabama, he also served as a program officer for the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC for a year, and then as an on-site officer for another two years. In 1996, Professor Lammertsma took a position as Professor and Head of Organic Chemistry at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he remained until 2016. Since then, he has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Professor Lammertsma has over 250 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of physical and computational organic and inorganic chemistry. He is also the recipient of numerous honors, awards, and fellowships, some of which have brought him for short stays to scientific institutes in the USA, Japan, India, Italy, and Germany. More recently, Professor Lammertsma has developed an interest in environmental and resource conservation issues. These topics include the underappreciated shortage of phosphorus that can be expected to develop in the near future, and also "green chemistry" more generally, i.e., the question of how to make industrial chemical processes environmentally benign and how to minimize the depletion of limited natural resources.
