Victor "Vic" W. Day, Ph.D.

Obituary

Victor W. Day, Ph.D., passed peacefully at 82 years young the morning of June 18th, 2026 in his new home in Duluth, Georgia. Known as Vic to some friends and family, he was born in Dayton, Kentucky on December 12, 1943 and graduated as the Salutatorian of the class of 1961 at Simon Kenton High School in Independence, Kentucky. He was mentored by Donald Sands and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Kentucky before he completed his Ph.D. with J. Lynn Hoard at Cornell University. He then took up a postdoctoral position with F. Albert Cotton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and afterwards, a faculty position at the University of Nebraska and a position as crystallographer at the University of Kansas.  

Victor was predeceased by his son Victor (Guy) W. Day, Junior in 1984. He is survived by his wife, Sung Ok Kang, Ph.D. Pharm.D. of Duluth, GA; his adult children, Amanda (and Joseph) E. Day Van Swearingen, Ph.D. of Durham, North Carolina and Zachary R. Day, Ph.D. of Delano, California; and their mother, Cynthia S. Day, Ph.D. of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Victor, together with Cynthia, taught his children the joy and struggles of science and discovery, and took great pride in his children’s accomplishments.

Those who knew Victor knew him as a remarkably intelligent scientist and a true force of nature. He often seemed invincible and yielded a wicked, sharp sense of humor, both at work and at play. He was a world-class scientist, specifically as an inorganic chemist and crystallographer, and was well recognized by his peers, having published over 325 peer-reviewed publications and worked with several Nobel Laureates in his career. He mentored and trained numerous students, postdocs, and early career scientists over his 60+ year scientific career.

One of Victor’s greatest joys in life was food. He loved spicy foods – Vindaloo and Thai Penang curry were favorites – as were big burgers, pizza, peanut butter, and lemon meringue pie. His second greatest joy was a “good deal”, whether that meant hitting multiple stores to get the best prices on groceries or driving a longer distance for cheaper gas. He also loved a good game, particularly if he could be competitive against an opponent. Sometimes that opponent was how much gas was left in the tank versus how far to the best gas prices – and he didn’t always win.

A private visitation with immediate family was held soon after his passing, followed by cremation. A memorial event celebrating the life, laughs and legacy of Victor will be planned by his children and held on a future date. Details will be provided once available. If you would like to receive details about a future memorial, please  complete the RSVP form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfTlHVjb5caBEMXifVRvH770JiOI1LmYPtpB5Wo9gjq7lZicw/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=116413337251674484801.

Scientific Career Overview

Victor W. Day died the morning of Thursday, June 18, 2026 at his home in Duluth, GA where he had recently relocated. Victor was born on December 12, 1943 in Dayton, KY and graduated from Simon Kenton High School in Independence, KY in 1961. He attended the University of Kentucky and began studying chemical crystallography, a topic that would become his scientific passion, as a sophomore under the direction of Donald E. Sands in 1962. His earliest publications with Sands described the low temperature structure of cyclo-octane (1965) and butadiene sulfone (1967). Under Prof. Sands’ tutelage, Victor completed 3 publications as an undergraduate, a remarkable feat at the time given the technical demands of crystallography. After completing his B.S. degree at Kentucky in 1965, he attended Cornell University as an NSF graduate student from 1965-1969. While at Cornell, he worked in the laboratory of Prof. J. Lynn Hoard, conducting research on high coordination number tropolonato complexes of thorium and holmium.

Victor then moved to MIT and took up a position as an NIH postdoctoral fellow with Prof. F. Albert Cotton from 1969-1972, where he performed high-resolution single crystal protein X-ray structure determinations for staphylococcal nuclease bound to an inhibitor as well as small molecule structure determinations for models of the arginine-phosphate binding observed in the protein-inhibitor complex. This work resulted in 4 publications with the Cotton group. Victor also began working on structures of fused cycloalkane organometallic complexes with the Cotton group. In subsequent years, he continued his inorganic and organometallic structural collaboration with Cotton, completing the structures of a number of small molecules.

Victor joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Nebraska in 1972 where he remained for 33 years. He taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses at UNL, where the difficulty of even his multiple-choice exams was legendary. While at Nebraska, his interests migrated back from protein crystallography to his first love, small molecule crystallography. He had extensive internal and external collaborations with many scientists at that time. His collaborations with UNL faculty included fellow chemists Bob Marianelli, Charles Kingsbury, Chris Michejda, Desmond Wheeler, T. Adrian George, and John Belot. Externally, he collaborated with multiple scientists, including Earl Muetterties (Cornell/UC-Berkeley), Tobin Marks at Northwestern, Walter Klemperer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and multiple others. He loved the challenges presented by many of the difficult structures and was always willing to “take a look”. While at Nebraska, Victor also mentored a number of Ph.D. and Masters students with whom he maintained lifelong contact, “Zooming” with some former group members as recently as 2 weeks before his death.

In 1979, Victor and his wife, Cynthia S. Day, started a small consulting company, Crystalytics, which, at that time was one of only two active commercial entities that provided single-crystal X-ray crystallographic services for industry, government labs and academic institutions in this country. Due to the confidential nature of many of the projects, only a small percentage of the commercial structures determined at Crystalytics were published in the open literature.

Victor retired from UNL in 2005 and relocated to the University of Kansas where he served as a Senior Scientist and Lab Director for 15 years. At KU, Victor supervised the X-ray crystallography laboratory and performed single crystal X-ray structural analyses as well as X-ray powder diffraction analyses on crystalline organic, inorganic, organometallic and biological compounds. Victor collaborated with multiple faculty members at KU, including Kristin Bowman-James, James Blakemore, Tim Jackson, and Jeff Aube among others. Many of his publications involved non-routine structure determinations with pseudo-symmetry, complex disorder and/or twinning issues – challenges that he welcomed. During his time at KU and beyond, he was prolific and published more than 140 peer-reviewed papers. He officially retired from KU in 2020 but continued to work with a number of his former colleagues, conducting additional crystallographic research. Since retiring from KU, he continued to work with data collected at KU before he retired, or data that had been collected elsewhere. Very recently, he had performed microED structure determinations with data collected at Rigaku, resulting in a 2025 Angewandte Chemie paper. At the time of his death, Victor was actively working on the refinement of a particularly complicated structure with the Blakemore lab and consulting on several others as well. These “post retirement” activities were a joy to all those involved and most importantly, demonstrate his passion for science and the enduring inspiration that he sparked in his collaborators and friends.

Victor also wrote NSF-MRI and NIH-shared instrumentation proposals for X-ray and other instrumentation and served on multiple NSF-MRI instrumentation review panels. With more than 60 years of small-molecule crystallographic experience as a student, chemistry department faculty member, industrial consultant and core lab director, he solved and refined thousands of routine and non-routine small-molecule single-crystal structures, resulting in more than 325 publications in peer-reviewed journals. He helped mentor a number of graduate students, post-docs, and early career faculty/scientists on the more complex aspects of crystallography. He enhanced the fields of chemistry and crystallography through mentoring and sharing his dedication to scientific rigor and technical quality, as well as through training others to communicate with precision and write with clarity and logic. Victor’s impact advanced the field of crystallography, in particular, by providing foundations to validate breakthroughs in several areas of chemistry, including supramolecular chemistry, catalysis, and synthesis of medicinal compounds. As a prolific collaborator, his meticulous X-ray analysis bridged the gap between theoretical molecular design and physical reality, directly enabling decades of chemical innovation.