The
File for the Future Second
in a series on the young
fessors
at Tech
university
leaders
who of
will the
be
proour future.
Jack Hine, Ph.D.
University of Illinois. He received his Ph.D. at Illinois in 1947 at the age of 24 and went on to do post-doctorate work at MIT and Harvard. He came to Tech as Assistant Professor of Organic Chemistry in 1949. While attending chemistry classes at Illinois, Jack met Mildred Halacek, an undergraduate chemistry student. They were married in 1946 after Mildred had received her B.S. in Chemistry. Mrs. Hine now assists her husband in his research work and their first published work, "The Relative Acidity of Water, Methanol and Other Weak Acids in Isopropyl Alcohol Solution," won second prize in the 1953 Georgia Tech Sigma Xi awards. They have one child, Katherine, born in 1949, who spends her mornings at the Tech nursery school while her parents are working on research problems. The young Tech chemist has had many of his papers published in various chemical journals including the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Journal on Chemical Education. He is at present working on a textbook for the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. The text is for a three-quarter graduate course in Physical Organic Chemistry and is now about half completed. Since 1950, Dr. Hine has received research grants from the Research Corporation of New York and the National Science Foundation totaling $18,500 and research contracts totaling $11,652 from the Atomic Energy Commission. He has also received large contracts from the Office of Ordnance Research for work during this period. He has received many honors in his field including membership in Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Alpha Chi Sigma, American Chemical Society, Chemical Society of London, American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Georgia Academy of Science.
Tech's School of Chemistry seems to have an over-abundance of brilliant young professors who could qualify as educational leaders of the future. One of the youngest and most brilliant of this group is Dr. Jack Hine, Associate Professor of Chemistry. Dr. Hine has just passed his 30th November-December, 1953
birthday and has been teaching and doing research work at Tech for four years. After graduating in Chemistry from the University of Arkansas in 1943, Jack went to work as a research chemist with the Cities Service Oil Co. in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. In 1945 he returned to his studies, this time at the
Here is another case of an exceptional young man being lured into the academic world when probably he could realize more financial and social gain in the commerical research fields. When approached as to his reasons for selecting teaching as a profession, Dr. Hine answered quickly and simply: "I went into academic work mainly because it offered the greatest opportunity to do research on topics of my own choice. There is much more independence of research selection in the academic field than there is in the commercial world. My main research interest is in a new field called Physical Organic Chemistry, which essentially consists of making organic chemistry an exact physical science. Tech offers me a place to do my work in peace,"
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