Marjorie D. Traxler

American chemist. While an undergraduate at Northwestern University she joined Howard E. Zimmerman’s laboratory in 1954, where she investigated the stereochemistry of the Ivanov and Reformatsky reactions.

In 1957 Zimmerman and Traxler published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society the paper in which they proposed a six-membered, chair-shaped cyclic transition state to explain and predict the stereochemistry of the addition of metal enolates to carbonyl compounds: the Zimmerman–Traxler model.