Research Council fellow, who was sharing an office-laboratory with Saul Winstein, a young faculty member in the newly organized UCLA graduate program. Ernie spent many stimulating hours talking chemistry with Cohen, who had taken a number of young German-Jewish immigrants under his wing.

Winstein was exploring the details of organic displacement reactions through solvolysis (reactions where the solvent is the displacing agent). He gave particular attention to neighboring group effects, where a properly placed group within the reacting molecule participates in the displacement. Winstein was an enormously creative and demanding research director who insisted on the highest standards of rigor in the prosecution of his projects. Upon graduation from his undergraduate program Grunwald began his doctoral program with Winstein and was soon identified as a major addition to his group. A steady flow of publications came from their collaboration during and after Grunwald’s doctoral research, summarized in his 1947 dissertation, “Solvolytic Substitution in the Presence of Neighboring Groups.” Grunwald’s introduction to the study of solvent interactions in Winstein’s laboratory established a theme that would continue throughout the 50 years of his research career

After receiving his Ph.D. Grunwald continued for a brief period as an instructor at UCLA, where he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, but then spent the next year in an industrial position as a research chemist at the Portland Cement Company. Fortunately he was granted a Jewett Fellowship in 1949 to study at Columbia for a year. He had already been identified as a rising star, and in 1949 was recruited to join the chemistry department at Florida State University, which had embarked on a major program hoping to convert it from a prewar teachers college into “the Harvard of the South.” In 1952 he married his wife, Esther.