Philip Rieger papers (OF.1UF.R2)

Biographical Note

Philip Rieger (1935-2004) was Professor of Chemistry at Brown University. He died April 17, 2004, in Providence, Rhode Island. Upon graduation from Reed College in 1956, Rieger accepted a Eugene Higgins Fellowship to attend Columbia University. During his Ph.D. studies at Columbia he assisted in the graduate instrument analysis laboratory, gave recitation sections in physical chemistry and was supported as a US Rubber Company Fellow and subsequently as an NSF Cooperative Fellow. His Ph.D. work at Columbia under the direction of Prof. George K. Fraenkel began for him what turned into a lifelong investigation in the area of electron spin resonance spectroscopy. For his Ph.D. studies, he investigated various transition metal chelates in solution particularly those of vanadium (IV) and a variety of anion radicals derived from aromatic compounds. This work led to several papers in the Journal of the American Chemical.

On June 18, 1957 he married Anne B. Lloyd, who also graduated with an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Reed College and who also obtained her Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Columbia University. He and Anne moved to Providence in 1962 where he was appointed as an instructor for one year following which he moved through the ranks of Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Brown. Other professional appointments included yearlong sabbaticals at the University of Adelaide in 1970, the University of Otago in1977 and the University of Bristol in 1991, and the University of Vermont. He established close personal and professional relationships with scientists at each of these universities. With many of these individuals he continued active scientific collaboration right up until his death.

Upon joining the ranks of Brown’s emeriti faculty in the summer of 2002 after forty years of service at Brown, Rieger had contributed well over 100 original manuscripts to the chemical literature mainly on the electron paramagnetic studies of classical inorganic coordination compounds, organometallic radicals and radical anions. He had developed methods for the analysis of electron spin resonance spectra of frozen solutions and powders and he also developed theoretical methods for the interpretation of the ESR spectra of these species to illuminate the electronic structure of the molecules that he studied. He was a chemistry consultant for the Educational Testing Service of Princeton NJ and he authored a highly successful textbook entitled “Electrochemistry”. For many years he served as the departmental chemistry concentration advisor and he was an active participant on university committees focused on undergraduate education such as the Committee on Academic Standing (CAS) and the College Curriculum Committee (CCC).