After more than half a century teaching organic chemistry at WSU, professor Donald Matteson remains an active contributor to the school.

Matteson began working for the university in 1958 as an instructor in the chemistry department. Two years later, he became an assistant professor.

His colleague, Greg Crouch, notes that in Matteson’s 53 years at WSU, he has trained more graduate students than anyone else in the chemistry department. Matteson and his wife, Professor Emeritus Marianna Matteson, have also actively donated to the university, supporting such things as research apprenticeships and undergraduate scholarships.  

Taking that into consideration, at the 50-year mark of his career Matteson’s colleagues came up with a way to commemorate his work, Crouch said. They decided to organize the Donald S. Matteson Symposium to bring leading thinkers in the field of organic chemistry to speak at WSU in a day-long event.

“I feel very honored by the whole thing,” Matteson said. “When it first started up, I was taken by surprise.”

Since its inception, the symposium has become an annual event, bringing in attendees from universities all over the Pacific Northwest. This year, Crouch counted 108 guests at the symposium — held Saturday in the CUB Senior Ballroom – making for one of the best turnouts so far.

The event highlighted five featured speakers, including two McArthur “genius award” recipients. A couple years ago, it featured chemist Robert Grubbs, a 2005 Nobel Prize laureate from the California Institute of Technology.

“There is not a symposium like this in the Pacific Northwest, with the quality of speakers,” said Crouch, who organized the event, “and the goal has always been to involve the area colleges.”

People showed up from Gonzaga, Central Washington, Eastern Washington and other universities throughout the region.

Crouch first had Matteson as a professor and then as a colleague.

“I’ve known him from both of those vantage points,” Crouch said. “There’s a generosity of spirit that extends to both Don and Marianna that, as a graduate student, if we needed something … Don would drop anything he was doing and make time.”

Matteson smiled and laughed at the compliment.

“I didn’t always have enough time for all the undergraduates that wanted to miss the lecture and then come up and ask me to recite it for them,” he said.

During the course of the past half century, Matteson, now in his late 70s, has made major advancements on research into boron, a chemical element. His work paved the way for the development of the cancer-fighting drug Velcade, used in treatment of multiple myeloma.

“Everything I did with boron chemistry was new,” he said. “At the time I started out, very few of its reactions were really known well — what you could put it with, how you could build a molecule that looked like some biologically active thing.”

Research has dramatically changed during Matteson’s decades of involvement in chemistry. Much of his work focused on basic scientific questions, regardless of whether it had a clear application to real world issues at the time. Years later, though, that application became much clearer, Crouch said.

Out of respect for Matteson’s work and his approach to helping students, Matteson has won the loyalty of many former students, Crouch said.

“Don’s former students have supported this symposium very generously,” he said.

One student donated $4,500 to the symposium for two consecutive years.

Donations have played one of the major roles in funding the symposium during the past four years. Along with registration fees, the donations have always come through with enough money to run the event, but finding the last bits of funding is usually a struggle, Crouch said. He hopes to figure out a more stable funding plan for next year, such as getting the university to partially support the event.

“The university has to get behind it,” Crouch said. “The university has to decide it’s something that they want to do.”

Matteson said the symposium gives the region a chance to connect with leading thinkers from all over the country.

“The symposium kind of puts Washington State on the map,” Matteson said. “We’re a long way from anywhere, but it’s a place worth coming to.”