Distinguished Alum Rik Tykwinski was here from the University of Alberta to deliver his lecture, Still Chasing Carbyne.

Rik Tykwinski is a physical organic chemist with a focus on structure-property relationships in conjugated molecules.

He earned his PhD from the University of Utah with Peter Stang in 1994. He worked with Professor François Diederich as a PDF at ETH-Zürich and then joined the faculty at the University of Alberta in 1997.

In 2009 he accepted a position as Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. In 2016 he became Chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alberta.

In 2020 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Utah.