Joseph J. Katz (April 19, 1912, Detroit – January 28, 2008, Chicago) was a chemist at Argonne National Laboratory whose fundamental research on the chemistry of photosynthesis led to his election to the US National Academy of Sciences.
He worked for seven years at small companies in Detroit, developing adhesives, metal polishing compounds, lubricants and other specialty chemical formulations used in the automobile industry.
They carried out independent research from 1932 through 1939, trying to cure tuberculosis by finding a substance that could dissolve the fatty outer coating of the TB bacillus so that it would be vulnerable to being destroyed by a drug.
Unemployed in summer 1939, he followed a suggestion from a former teacher and applied for graduate school in chemistry at the University of Chicago.
His thesis research in physical organic chemistry under the supervision of Frank R. Mayo was a study of the mechanism of addition of hydrogen chloride to isobutene in a solvent of low dielectric constant.