Juan Cesar (Tito) Scaiano, OC, FRSC (born 1945) first came to Canada in 1975 as a visiting scientist with the National Research Council from Argentina. Returning to the NRC in 1979, he developed an innovative new program studying organic reaction intermediates using laser techniques. He then joined the University of Ottawa in 1991 as a professor of chemistry.
Current projects in the Scaiano Research Group include such diverse topics as fluorescent sensors, photolithography, persistent free radicals, and nanoparticles.
Since then he has won many national and international awards for his work in photochemistry. He was the first to use two lasers to follow photochemical changes in short-lived intermediates during a reaction which allows scientists to measure photochemical reactions. He has won awards including the Premier's Platinum Medal for Research Excellence, which is one of the largest single research awards in the world, the Tory Medal, the Rutherford Memorial Medal, the Izaak-Walton-Killam Award, and the 2002 Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. [1] In 2020, he received the Nicholas J. Turro award.
In 2005 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. The citation reads:
He is a member of the Centre for Research in Photonics at the University of Ottawa. He also founded a company named Luzchem which builds and sells photochemistry equipment.
Photochemistry is the branch of chemistry concerned with the chemical effects of light. Generally, this term is used to describe a chemical reaction caused by absorption of ultraviolet, visible (400–750 nm), or infrared radiation (750–2500 nm).
George Andrew Olah was a Hungarian-American chemist. His research involved the generation and reactivity of carbocations via superacids. For this research, Olah was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 "for his contribution to carbocation chemistry." He was also awarded the Priestley Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Chemical Society and F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research of the American Chemical Society in 1996.
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