Maitland Jones, Jr., is Professor of Chemistry at New York University. His undergraduate and graduate degrees are from Yale University. A long-time teacher of the organic chemistry course at Princeton, he is also an internationally recognized research scientist. His field of expertise is reactive intermediates, extremely short-lived molecules that exist only momentarily in the course of a chemical reaction. Within that subfield, Professor Jones is particularly interested in carbenes, carbon atoms with only two of their bond-forming electrons linked to other atoms, instead of the usual four. He is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on this subject and travels widely, lecturing on his research.