John Edwin Baldwin, a longtime faculty member and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, died May 26, 2024. He was 86. 

Baldwin did his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College, graduating as valedictorian of his class in 1959. He then pursued his doctoral studies in chemistry and physics under Jack Roberts at California Institute of Technology, earning his PhD in 1963.

In 1968, Baldwin joined the University of Oregon as a professor. During his sixteen-year tenure, he was a professor in the Department of Chemistry and served five years as the dean of Arts and Sciences. He spent his final decades of teaching and research at Syracuse University in New York, starting in 1984. At Syracuse, Baldwin co-led the eight-year creation of the 230,000-square-foot Life Sciences Complex and chaired the Department of Chemistry. 

Deeply interested in his field of physical organic chemistry and dedicated to the universities where he worked, Baldwin developed a reputation as a gifted and meticulous scholar, researcher, collaborator, teacher and mentor. He was one of the first to use density functional theory and other emerging quantum calculations to gain insights into chemical bonding and reaction mechanisms. In 2010, Baldwin received the coveted James Flack Norris Award  American Chemical Society for his original mathematical approaches and ingenious isotopic labeling to solve the most challenging problems.