| Citation | Roger Alder has made a career-long contribution to structure and reactivity in Organic Chemistry. He was the first to recognize and utilise the enhanced basicity of tertiary amines brought about by sterically driven proton capture (proton sponges) and the first to develop a systematic relationship between geometry and properties in bridgehead amines. He demonstrated the important effects arising from quaternary carbon centres in polymer chains. He has recently pioneered the physical organic chemistry of stable carbenes. He has made several challenges to the status quo through computational and experimental chemistry, for example in planar tetracordinate carbon and radical-drivenaromatic rearrangements. |