Dr. Engelbert “Bert” Ciganek is retiring after more than four decades of service to Organic Reactions. Bert joined the Board in 1983 and has been an extremely productive author and editor since that time. He served on the Board of Editors until the year 2000 and as an Editorial Advisor from 2000 to 2025. He has authored or co-authored seven Organic Reactions chapters:
- The Intramolecular Diels-Alder Reaction (Volume 32, 1984)
- The Catalyzed α-Hydroxyalkylation and α-Aminoalkylation of Activated Olefins (The Morita–Bayliss–Hillman Reaction) (Volume 51, 1997)
- α-Hydroxylation of Enolates and Silyl Enol Ethers (Volume 62, 2003)
- Electrophilic Amination of Carbanions, Enolates, and Their Surrogates (Volume 72, 2008)
- Copper-catalyzed Amination of Aryl and Alkenyl Electrophiles (Volume 85, 2014)
- The Julia–Kocienski Olefination (Volume 95, 2018)
- The Matteson Reaction (Volume 105, 2021)
Bert was born in 1930 and earned his Ph.D. in 1959 under the guidance of Arthur C. Cope, who would become the Editor-in-Chief of Organic Reactions in 1960. He joined duPont Central Research in 1961, transferring to their Medical Products division in 1981 and duPont Merck Pharmaceuticals in 1991. He retired in 1994 as a Senior Research Fellow.
We are extremely grateful for Bert’s invaluable contributions to Organic Reactions and wish him the best in retirement!