M. Frederick Hawthorne, who established the field of boron chemistry almost single-handedly and won countless awards for his research, including the Priestley Medal in 2009 and the National Medal of Science in 2011, died July 8. He was 92. “He became the master of boron hydride chemistry—that will forever be linked with the name of Hawthorne,” says J. Fraser Stoddart , a chemist at Northwestern University and corecipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Hawthorne was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1928. He got his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Pomona College in 1949 and his PhD in 1953 at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hawthorne began investigating boron chemistry shortly after finishing his doctorate, as a researcher at Rohm & Haas’s Redstone Arsenal research division in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1969, after a few academic hops, Hawthorne returned to UCLA as a full professor. By then, he