Page 16 • Lehigh University Naval Midshipman scholarship, worked as a polymer chemist at Alkyd Resins and Polymer Corporation, and was engaged in both routine clinical analyses and clinical research at the Reading Hospital. Liver enzyme levels, protein bound iodine numbers, blood sugars, glucose tolerance tests, and BUNs were just a few of the countless assays Bob learned to run as individual procedures years before the introduction of the auto-analyzers, ACAs, and microtiter formatted Elisas made clinical chemistry a highly instrumented field. Thanks to a supervising pathologist who encouraged research, Bob published three articles on new analytical methods for serum amino acids and for lactic dehydrogenase. He caught the fever for doing chemistry research. At Lehigh, Bob’s interests in the biomedical aspects of chemistry found fulfillment in his doctoral project on antibiotic syntheses under Professor Irving J. Borowitz. Borowitz taught chemistry at Lehigh from 1959 to 1965. Borowitz, a native New Yorker with strong professional and social ties to the Big Apple moved from Lehigh to Yeshiva University and took several of his Lehigh grad students with him. Bob, however, was well on the way to completing his PhD and in addition had ties to the greater Reading area with a home, wife, and twin daughters (born 1955) so relocation to NYC wasn’t feasible. Professor Thomas Young took over as Bob’s day-to-day mentor but Borowitz remained Bob’s dissertation supervisor and signator of the final document. Four publications in Tetrahedron and in the Journal of Organic Chemistry resulted from Bob’s doctoral dissertation. In 1967, with his Lehigh diploma in hand and some part-time teaching experience as an instructor at Lafayette College, he was appointed Assistant Professorship at Albright College. There he rose through the ranks to full professor. While at Albright Bob steadily encouraged the best and brightest of Albright students to take their own graduate degrees at his alma mater on ol’ South Mountain. The annual fall trip of carloads of Albright seniors visiting LU’s chemistry Death of Robert D. Rapp (LU PhD 1967) and Retired Visiting Research Scientist (1992-2018) It would be just after 8 am on a Monday or Tuesday morning and regular as clockwork Robert D. Rapp (LU PhD 1967) would have arrived at his 7th floor Mudd Laboratory prepared to work. From 1992 to 2018, Rapp, a visiting research scientist, had the longest association with the department of any volunteer alumnus. Bob Rapp passed away on October 4, 2022 at the age of 91 at the Zerbe Home in Lancaster, Pa., from the complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Bob was 34, working in a Reading clinical lab, when he enrolled at Lehigh in pursuit of a PhD in organic chemistry. Not only in age but also in experience, Bob was far from the typical Lehigh chemistry grad student. During the Korean War he’d served as a hospital corpsman in the US Navy (1949-1955), studied chemistry at Tufts under a
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