Kenneth G. Caulton

Kenneth G. Caulton was an American inorganic chemist who made significant contributions to, projects dealing with transition metal hydrides. He was a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University before retiring in 2020. Specifically, Caulton worked on the chemistry of paramagnetic organometallic complexes, metal polyhydride complexes and the dihydrogen ligand, catalytic activation of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, and alkoxide chemistry. Caulton's work with transition metal complexes was ultimately aimed to create complexes that exhibit unexpected and novel reactivities.

Caulton received his B.S. degree from Carleton College in Minnesota. Following his undergraduate degree, he worked under Richard Fenske at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he studied transition metal bonding with various computational methods dealing with molecular orbital theory. Caulton then worked with F. Albert Cotton at MIT, where he continued to study transition metal bonding.