This interview is with Gerd La Mar, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton and post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Copenhagen and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), he joined the Chemical Physics Department of the Shell Development Company in Emeryville CA. He was appointed to the Department of Chemistry in 1971 where he initiated research in the area of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy on biological macromolecules. Specifically, his work focused on NMR of proteins and enzymes; on structure-function relationship of hemoproteins and iron-sulfur proteins; on electronic structure of metalloporphyrins; and on the use of paramagnetic shifts and relaxation as structural tools. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow from 1972-76 and was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Sabbatical Fellowship in 1975. In 1984, Professor La Mar received a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship to lecture extensively in Japan. In 1988 he was awarded the Louis A. Strait Spectroscopy Medal for his range of work on NMR spectroscopy on proteins. He was the founding Director of the UCD NMR facility in 1979 and held that post until 1995. In 2014 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on porphyrins from the International Society for Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines at their International Conference in Istanbul. Gerd is interviewed by his friend and colleague, Thomas Jue, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine.
