ZAX

David Zax was hired by Cornell University, through a traditional faculty search process, and was appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry to begin in the Fall, 1990. I was accepted for admission to the graduate program in Chemistry about Christmastime, 1989 to begin studies at Cornell University at the same time that David Zax began working. I began the whole graduate school process at Cornell by preparing for and taking American Chemical Society standard graduate competency, or placement, exams. At some time before the Fall semester began in 1990, I directly met David Zax by going to his office in Baker Laboratory and talking to him about his research program. He told me he was taking students in a research area of solid state NMR. At this time I came across a friendly graduate student entering Cornell with me named Benjamin Chew. Ben Chew joined David Zax's research group in the Fall, 1990 and he was Zax's first student. Chew was mathematically competent, and quite adept at troubleshooting complicated instrumentation and he helped David Zax assemble the first solid state NMR instrument that the group used; employing a large and powerful magnet. My interest at the time I talked to Zax about NMR work was to study instead high pressure chemistry with a diamond anvil cell, specifically I was interested in isolating or creating hypervalent compounds derived from ammonium salts. Hypervalent meaning that the coordination number about the N atom was greater than the usual 4. My choice of thesis advisor was thus Dick Porter and I applied to Porter's group and he, based upon my ACS competency exam scores and my GRE scores, accepted me in to his group. Later Porter unfortunately died and I was very lucky to be able to get Roald Hoffmann to go along with accepting me in to his theoretical chemistry group as a "honorary member". Zax and I worked together in about Fall, 1992 semester where he was the competent professor, and I was the perhaps struggling graduate student teaching assistant. teaching a kind of upper level undergraduate course that was oriented towards instrumentation and physical chemistry. Zax was very patient with me and was liberal minded about my teaching methods. The semester progressed smoothly with Zax as the professor, and I learned much physical chemistry from him as I tried to be a reasonable teaching staff to the very bright Cornell undergraduate students I had responsibility for then. 2 very bright students that come to mind from the Fall, 1992 period were Ross Berntson and Alice Mauskopf. Zax kept me on for the whole semester and it all worked out OK between us. Today in 2020 Zax is still a Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University and he has written over 60 scientific articles in his unique area of Analytical-Physical Chemistry....he also has written over a dozen general interest science articles for the glossy, high profile magazine Smithsonian, and in what else I have learned about David Zax he is a very active member of the Cornell University Senate. During the time I got to know David Zax I must admit I felt a kind of unusual kinship with him for some reason.