Alfred Robert Bader CBE (April 28, 1924 – December 23, 2018) was a Canadian chemist, businessman, philanthropist, and collector of fine art.

His grandfather, Moritz Ritter von Bader, had been a civil engineer, who worked on the Suez Canal and was knighted by Emperor Franz Josef for his service as Austrian consul at Ismaïlia.

[3]: 1 While in England, Bader attended the East Hove Senior School for Boys, and Brighton Technical College.

[3]: 3–7  In 1940 he was sent to a Canadian internment camp for European refugees (which Bader described as spartan but a good influence on his academic and social education).

[3]: 7–10  A Montreal sponsor, Martin Wolff, welcomed him into a Canadian Jewish family in late 1941 and encouraged him to study further.

[7] At Harvard, he studied with famed organic chemist Louis Fieser, working on the rearrangement of quinones and the development of intermediates in the Hooker oxidation process.

His appointment to the Milwaukee, Wisconsin research facilities broke an unwritten rule against the hiring of Jews and African Americans.

[3]: 23–25 During this time, Bader became increasingly aware of the need for a small reliable company dedicated to providing quality research chemicals.

At that time Kodak was their only supplier, and the large company seemed to show insufficient consideration for small and independent researchers.

Bader bought interesting compounds from a variety of sources in the United States and Europe and listed them in his catalog.

By 1954 Bader and his first wife, Helen "Danny" Daniels, bought Eisendrath out of Aldrich,[3]: 26–29  becoming "sole and equal owners of the company.

They saved time and work in preparation, and the availability of standardized key reagents and starting materials contributed to the reproducibility of experimental results.

The company's "Big Red"[9] annual catalog was often used as a reference work because of the extensive physical data and structural information that it contained.

[3]: 38 [13] A lifelong collector, Bader has devoted himself to the study of art history and collection of many fine paintings.

[13] Beginning with its first issue in 1968, Bader contributed numerous articles on art subjects to the Aldrich Chemical Company's journal, Aldrichimica Acta.

[12][14] Artworks from his collection were also featured on the Aldrich Handbook, beginning with the Quill Cutter by Paulus de Lesire in the 1967–68 edition of the catalog.

He purchased the 15th century Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex, England, and donated it to Queen's University, which opened Bader College there in 1994.

The centre contains a music performance hall, a studio theatre, a small cinema, an art and media lab, a large rehearsal hall and many classrooms, and brings together the Department of Film and Media, the School of Music, the Department of Drama, and the Bachelor of Fine Art Program at Queen's.

[12] The Baders have also supported Project SEED, an American Chemical Society initiative that gives scholarships to economically disadvantaged high school students and enables them to conduct hands-on research.

[44] As of 2011, the Baders had donated $1.6 million towards the construction of the proposed Kenwood Interdisciplinary Research Complex (KIRC) at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM).

His romance in England with Isabel Overton (1926–2022),[56] the daughter of a deeply religious Protestant family in Northern Ontario and a graduate of Victoria University in Toronto, began with a shipboard meeting in 1949[57] and continued in a rapid courtship and some 400 love letters.

Isabel broke off the relationship because of religious concerns and settled in Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex, England but did not become romantically involved with anyone else.

Similar in many ways to Isabel, including a Protestant religious upbringing, Danny converted to Judaism before Bader proposed to her.