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2015 ACS NATIONAL AWARD WINNERS Recipients are HONORED FOR CONTRIBUTIONS of major significance to chemistry EDITED BY SOPHIE L. ROVNER
some of the recipients of national awards administered by the American Chemical Society for 2015. C&EN will publish the remaining sets of vignettes over the next several weeks. A profile of Jacqueline K. Barton, the 2015 Priestley Medalist, will appear in the March 23 issue of C&EN along with her award address. Most of the award recipients will be honored at an awards ceremony that will be held on March 24 in conjunction with the spring ACS national meeting in Denver. However, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar awardees will be honored at the fall ACS national meeting in Boston, Aug. 16–20.
GEORGE C. PIMENTEL AWARD IN CHEMICAL EDUCATION Sponsored by Cengage Learning and the ACS Division of Chemical Education The impact that I. Dwaine Eubanks, professor emeritus at Clemson University, has had on the world of chemistry education reaches far and wide. Active in the ACS Division of Chemical Education, including a stint as its chair in 1985, he has helped to develop innovative chemistry curricula, authored and illustrated textbooks, and pioneered new methods of chemistry assessment. Eubanks grew up as “a nerdy kid” in the oil patch of West Texas and set off for the University of Texas, Austin, receiving a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1960. The draft was in effect at that time, Eubanks says, so he decided to continue at UT Austin to work toward a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry. After earning his degree in 1963, he spent four years at Eubanks
DuPont doing research in actinide chemistry. “DuPont was a really great company to work for, but I realized early on that I was basically an academic at heart,” he says. So he began his academic career at Oklahoma State University. With encouragement from the department chair, Eubanks became director of Oklahoma State’s general chemistry program. At that point, he believed he could benefit from forging connections with a bigger network of educators. “That’s when I really started becoming active in chemistry education,” he says. Once he got involved, Eubanks says, “it was like a big vortex; it just sucked you in.” Over the years, he worked on several big curriculum projects, including “ChemCom: Chemistry in the Community,” from 1983 to 1986. ChemCom, an innovative high school textbook funded by the National Science Foundation and ACS, teaches chemistry from an issue-centered perspective. “Rather than starting with chemical principles, you started with a real-world problem, then developed the chemistry to address that problem,” Eubanks explains. He led a chapter-writing team, served on the editorial board, and also organized field centers to train teachers in the curriculum. ChemCom found a lot of success in the U.S., was translated into several languages, and served as a prototype for curriculum development projects in other countries. Eubanks also lent his talents in graphic design to the ACS-sponsored college textbooks “Chemistry in Context” and “Chemistry.” In reviewing earlier editions, he noticed errors in many of the illustrations. When he brought these errors to the attention of the publisher, it enlisted Eubanks to do the technical illustrations for the new editions. COU RT ESY O F DWA I N E EU BA N KS
THE FOLLOWING VIGNETTES highlight
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Eubanks’s work also helped give teachers better tools to assess their students’ grasp of chemical concepts. From 1988 to 2001, Eubanks was director of the ACS Examinations Institute. There, he spearheaded efforts to put improved testing methods and assessment techniques into practice. He took the Examinations Institute with him to Clemson University in 1992 after receiving a call with a job offer he “just couldn’t turn down.” He spent 11 years there and retired in 2003. “The breadth of his contributions to chemical education is truly extraordinary,” according to Mary Virginia Orna, a professor of chemistry at the College of New Rochelle, in New York. Eubanks, 76, was corecipient of the first award for outstanding service from the ACS Division of Chemical Education and was elected a fellow of ACS in 2012. Eubanks will present his award address before the Division of Chemical Education.—CORINNA WU
ACS AWARD FOR AFFORDABLE GREEN CHEMISTRY Sponsored by Dow Chemical and endowed by Rohm and Haas Replacing a major petrochemical process with a bioprocess that provides significant cost and greenhouse gas emissions savings is a career aspiration for many industrial chemists. It’s an aspiration that John Frye and Alan Zacher, chemists with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), along with Todd Werpy, senior vice president of R&D at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), have succeeded in turning into reality. Together, the trio of chemists devised an economically viable catalytic process to convert renewable raw materials, including sorbitol, and the biodiesel by-product glycerine into propylene glycol (PG), an intermediate for making polymers, detergents, and more. It is this process that has earned them their ACS award. Frye’s role in the project was largely to undertake catalyst optimization, development, and testing. Zacher, who is also a chemical engineer, was involved in process engineering, catalyst optimization, and process development. Werpy was the visionary and project lead who kept the science and economic cases yoked
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operating costs associated with renewable raw materials. Separately, there were also challenges relating to the purification of the product, Werpy says. The trio of chemists knew from the get-go that the key to the project’s success would be their ability to develop the right catalyst. They used high-throughput techniques to screen numerous combinations of metals. They settled on a rhenium-based catalyst. The eureka moment for the project came when testing one of the catalysts: “We first observed PG yields from glycerol hydrogenolysis in the 80–90% range,” Frye says. “This kind of selectivity on an early attempt really grabs your attention,” adds Frye, who during his career has been named as an inventor on more than 50 patents. The researchers have since secured significant patent coverage for the discovery of the rhenium-based catalyst and development of an industrial PG process. In March 2011, ADM opened a PG plant in Decatur, Ill., based on the technology. It has a capacity of 100,000 tons per year, enough to meet 20% of U.S. demand. The facility continues to be the world’s only source of high-purity PG from renewable materials. The commercial bio-PG process reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 61% when compared with PG derived from petrochemicals. With more than 2 billion lb of petroleum consumed every year in the production of PG, the potential environ-
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neers, civil engineers, and a variety of other experts. The Department of Energy funded the research at PNNL, which is a DOE research lab operated by Battelle Memorial Institute. Battelle licenses the technology to ADM. Both ADM and PNNL were engaged at the R&D stage. ADM has patents relating to the broader industrial process, including product purification. Each of the trio of chemists who led the project rates it as one of his career highlights. “It isn’t often that you get to be part of the team that was responsible for a discovery and then get to participate in the commercial deployment of that technology,” says Werpy, who is 52. For Zacher, 45, the project has had the biggest impact on his career of all the research projects he has been involved in so far. “This is partly because it was a syzygy of inspiration, opportunity, and market forces,” he says. “We’ve had cleverer ‘eureka’ ideas, but none of them have had the market—or economic—potential of glycerol to PG,” he says. Frye, 63, and Zacher continue to work together on a range of projects, including Marletta processes for converting CEN.ACS.ORG
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biomass into liquid transportation fuels. Lessons learned from the PG project have already made their way into their ongoing research activities. “John is a master at taking a mixture of partially related findings from old projects, remembering unfollowed rabbit trails from prior ideas, and adding a few half-forgotten journal articles to cook up inspiration that totally transforms our approach,” Zacher says. Generally, however, the level of understanding about bioprocesses remains a long way behind that of chemistry associated with petrochemical feedstocks, Werpy says. If this issue is to be addressed, “we need to do more to educate students on the chemistry of carbohydrates, oils, and proteins,” he says. Additional measures may be required. “We really have an opportunity to improve the cost structure of renewable materials, but it is going to take investment and technology advances in areas like biotechnology, aqueous-phase catalysis, and what I would call nontraditional separations,” Werpy adds. The researchers will present their award address before the Division of Cellulose & Renewable Materials.—ALEX SCOTT
ALFRED BADER AWARD IN BIOINORGANIC OR BIOORGANIC CHEMISTRY Sponsored by the Alfred R. Bader Fund Michael A. Marletta became a chemist be-
cause of food and “the joy of figuring things out,” he says. His father worked for R. T. French, of French’s Mustard fame. “My father would come home smelling of spices, and my mother was born in Italy and was a fantastic cook,” Marletta says. Eventually, he checked out a library book on food chemistry and discovered the natural product structures that give spices their smell and taste. His childhood generally involved a lot of library books, sports, and science, he says. After Sputnik launched, he got a telescope for Christmas. It seldom left his hand. The following year, he got a microscope and proceeded to study a pond he created from leaves and dechlorinated tap waCOURTESY OF MICHAEL MARLETTA
Frye
mental gains from the bioprocess are huge. The discovery team consisted of several additional chemists working on catalyst development, analytical chemistry, and process development. The team spent several years enhancing the catalysts that led to the more than 90% yields of PG, Werpy says. Developing the commercial project required dozens of chemists, chemical engiBATTELLE MEMORIAL INSTITUTE
DOUGL AS P. FRYE
COURTESY OF TODD WERPY
together and headed in the right direction. “The technical challenge was to achieve high yields of PG” from the process, Werpy says. One of the difficulties the team faced was that there was a relatively lower level of understanding about catalysts used in bioprocesses compared with those for petrochemical processes. The team also had to work to overcome the capital and
ACS NEWS
becoming president of Scripps Research Institute in 2012. He resigned that position in 2014 and remains on the Scripps faculty. Marletta will present his award address before the Division of Biological Chemistry.—JYLLIAN KEMSLEY
ACS AWARD FOR CREATIVE WORK IN SYNTHETIC ORGANIC CHEMISTRY Sponsored by Aldrich Chemical Co. LLC F. Dean Toste is no stranger to awards, but
being recognized with the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry is a special distinction for the University of California, Berkeley, chemistry professor. After all, it was organic chemistry’s creative component that lured Toste away from studying biochemistry during his undergraduate years at the University of Toronto. “When I took organic chemistry, I got hooked by the idea that you could create new molecules and new Toste reactions that didn’t exist before,” he says. “And if I’m going to rank the things that still appeal to me about organic chemistry 20 years later, the creative aspect of organic chemistry is at the top.” Chemists have taken note of Toste’s chemical creativity, particularly in the realm of catalysis. “Dean Toste is a phenomenon,” says his UC Berkeley colleague Robert Bergman. “He develops new synthetic methods with a rational rather than a ‘let’s try everything’ approach and facilitates them by a deep commitment to mechanistic understanding.” “As a scientist, Toste can be best described as creative, prolific, driven, a scholar, and a true raw talent,” says Princeton University chemistry professor David W. C. MacMillan, an expert in organic synthesis. “He is the type of person that has a sheer thirst for research, and his enthusiasm for chemistry as a whole is completely contagious.” Highlights of the prolific work to come from Toste’s lab include the development of high-oxidation-state metal-oxo complexes as catalysts for transformations CEN.ACS.ORG
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other than oxidation, work on anionic chiral catalysis, and pioneering research on the use of gold as a catalyst. “Gold was considered an inert metal that had little use in homogeneous catalysis,” notes California Institute of Technology’s Robert H. Grubbs, who was Toste’s postdoc adviser after his graduate work in Barry M. Trost’s group at Stanford University. “Dean demonstrated that there is a whole family of reactions that can be catalyzed efficiently by gold complexes.” Toste, 43, says there’s no secret behind his success, but if there is a guiding principle behind his work, it’s to explore unknown areas. “I think it’s important not to buy into what everybody else is doing just because it’s hot,” he says. “I tell my students to try to ignore all the noise of the field and do something you think is interesting, creative, and, hopefully, important.” And Toste hopes as a principal investigator, or PI, that his research program is one where students’ creativity can flourish. “If there’s anything I’m proud of, it’s the fact that I have a group of students who are extremely creative based on the environment that we’ve set up,” he says. The vibe is relatively laid-back, Toste explains, and students are encouraged to collaborate. “The PI gets the award, but everybody knows it was not the PI who did that work, and oftentimes it was not the PI who crystallized the ideas,” Toste points out. “There are a lot of fantastic people in my group who are really responsible for this award.” Toste will present his award address before the Division of Organic Chemistry.— COURTESY OF F. DEAN TOSTE
ter. Then he wanted a chemistry set. His father said no. Marletta credits that denial with cementing his interest in the subject. Marletta majored in chemistry and biology at SUNY Fredonia. In graduate school at the University of California, San Francisco, and during postdoctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Marletta synthesized molecules to help illuminate enzyme mechanisms. He went on to a faculty position in biological sciences at MIT, where he planned to focus on cytochrome P450 enzymes. Then a colleague, Steven R. Tannenbaum, convinced him that mammals were making nitrate. “He said to me that there were probably some novel enzymes involved,” Marletta says. “It was really that idea that led to the discoveries we’ve made in the nitric oxide area.” Marletta eventually established that immune system macrophages use arginine to make NO to kill pathogens; excess NO winds up excreted as nitrate. Meanwhile, other researchers demonstrated that NO plays key roles in vasodilation and neurotransmission. “Before this time, NO biosynthesis was thought to be restricted to bacteria engaged in nitrification reactions,” says Jack E. Dixon, associate vice chancellor of scientific affairs and a pharmacology professor at UC San Diego. “The idea that higher organisms could produce this unstable, toxic, diatomic free radical was considered extremely unlikely.” “Figuring out how NO is made and how it gets to receptors and to targets required embracing medicine, pharmacology, biochemistry, and chemistry,” Marletta says. Of his various findings, he highlights unraveling how guanylate cyclase can selectively sense NO in a sea of competing O2; he determined that NO binds more strongly to the enzyme’s heme cofactor unless the protein positions a hydrogenbonding residue to hold O2 in place. Marletta continues to study NO and other gas-signaling pathways in biological systems. He’s also working to understand fungal polysaccharide monooxygenases, which use copper to create nicks in cellulose. The nicks make it easier for cellulases to break down cellulose into fermentable products. The monooxygenases may also be important in human pathogen activity, Marletta says. Over the course of his career, Marletta, now 64, moved from MIT to the University of Michigan and then to UC Berkeley before
BETHANY HALFORD
HARRY GRAY AWARD FOR CREATIVE WORK IN INORGANIC CHEMISTRY BY A YOUNG INVESTIGATOR Sponsored by the Harry Gray Award Endowment Working at the interface between inorganic, physical, and nanoscale chemistry, Emily Weiss and her group at Northwestern University are laying the groundwork for
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ACS AWARD IN COLLOID & SURFACE CHEMISTRY Sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive Co. Some scientists’ areas of expertise are tough to explain to nonscientists. Not so for Paul S. Weiss. To put it simply, the Distinguished Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry and of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, works in a molecular playland. For more than 20 years, Weiss has been manipulating, imaging, and investigating the properties of individual atoms and molecules on surfaces. And he has built and studied the operation of tiny electronic and mechanical devices based on single molecules Paul Weiss CEN.ACS.ORG
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and self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of molecules. In a series of seminal studies in the 1990s, Weiss and coworkers disproved commonly accepted views about SAMs— namely that the molecules adsorb randomly, irreversibly, and permanently on the materials they’re coating. The techniques Weiss’s group developed in those studies became common tools for organizing SAMs and controlling surface dynamics. The team also resolved key questions and controversies regarding the mechanisms that govern the actions of single molecules at interfaces. To answer those questions, Weiss’s group conducted experiments on single-molecule conductivity that showed how measurement differences were tied to SAM defects. They also demonstrated methods for eliminating those defects. Those results are credited with stimulating important developments in molecular devices, including new types of molecular switches. Throughout his scientific career, Weiss has worked to expand the applicability and chemical specificity of scanning probe microscopy methods. He and his group continue to use these tools to advance the study of catalysis, molecular self-assembly, and nanoscale patterning and fabrication at ever-finer scales. The significance of Weiss’s contributions is widely recognized by his colleagues. As the University of Michigan’s Nicholas A. Kotov puts it, Weiss’s work “is characterized by creativity, insight, and focus on the critical issues of surface science.” Kotov, an expert in nanoscale materials, adds that Weiss has developed “the most precise and versatile tools for molecular patterning known today.” Weiss, 55, completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1986, he finished his Ph.D. studies at UC Berkeley and then served as a postdoctoral researcher at Bell Laboratories for two years. From 1988 to 1989, he conducted research at the IBM Almaden Research Center, and he then began an academic career at Pennsylvania State University, where he was eventually named Distinguished Professor of Chemistry & Physics. He moved to UCLA in 2009. Weiss is the recipient of PETER CUTTS PHOTOGRAPHY
such as multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance to provide new insights into the fundamental processes of interfacial electron transfer, he says. Although Weiss is not a traditionally trained inorganic chemist, her work is at the interface between inorganic and physical chemistry. She says that winning this award, which is typically given to an inorganic chemist, is quite special to her. “It means that our work is appreciated by the inorganic chemistry community, whereas we are typically characterized as a physical chemistry group,” she says. Weiss is committed to solving difficult, fundamental problems associated with nanoscale materials via multidisciplinary and collaborative science, Ratner says. “She is a dynamic, effective, insightful, creative, and superbly accomplished young scientist,” he says. She is also a popular teacher. When Weiss is not in the classroom or in the lab manipulating the electronic structures of nanoparticles, she can be found playing tennis or taking a stroll through downtown Chicago. Weiss will present her award address before the Division of Inorganic Chemistry.—BRITT ERICKSON WEISS GROUP
transforming colloidal nanostructures, such as semiconductor quantum dots, into functional materials. By modifying the surface of the quantum dots with organic ligands, the researchers are able to change the optical and electronic properties of the nanostructures. These hybrid structures are tunable for nearly any type of energy conversion process, including the high-efficiency conversion of solar power to electricity and chemical fuels. Organic ligands typically diminish the unique properties of the inorganic core of quantum dots. But Weiss, 36, has shown that some classes of ligands can actually enhance the properties of nanostructures in unpredictable ways. She Emily Weiss is being honored for her discovery of hybrid nanostructures, created by chemically modifying the surfaces of inorganic quantum dots with aromatic dithiocarbamates. The organic molecules become part of the delocalized electronic structure of the nanocrystal. Weiss and her group can control the behavior of energy and electrons at the interfaces between inorganic (semiconductor or metal) and organic materials, explains Josef Michl, a professor of physical organic chemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The researchers have developed new synthetic and analytical chemistry methods to gain as much control as possible over the interfacial chemical structure, and therefore electronic structure, he notes. Weiss has introduced rich chemical diversity to inorganic nanostructures, says one of her former Ph.D. advisers, Mark Ratner, a chemistry professor at Northwestern. She is transforming quantum dots from interesting structures to functional materials, such as field-effect transistors and photovoltaic and photocatalytic cells, he notes. “Many laboratories are working on these materials for applications from displays to sensors to medicine,” says James M. Mayer, a chemistry professor at Yale University familiar with Weiss’s work. Weiss has quickly become a leader in this area, he notes. Weiss moves seamlessly from highly physical approaches and measurements to synthetic chemistry to mechanistic thinking, Mayer says. For example, she has combined detailed photophysical and photochemical studies with other techniques
numerous awards and accolades. For example, he was honored with a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and NSF’s Creativity Award. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Physical Society, AVS, and the American Chemical Society and is an honorary fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society. Weiss’s accomplishments in scientific publishing are also noteworthy. He has published more than 250 scholarly journal articles and holds more than 20 patents. He has served as senior editor of Electron Device Letters, an Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers publication, and is the founding editor-in-chief of the highly acclaimed and award-winning journal ACS Nano. Weiss will present his award address before the Division of Colloid & Surface Chemistry.—MITCH JACOBY
ROBERT LANGER WINS QUEEN’S PRIZE FOR ENGINEERING Robert S. Langer, David H. Koch Institute
Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. The prize, worth more than $1.5 million, recognizes engineers whose innovations have benefited humanity globally. Langer is being honored for his “revolutionary advances and leadership in engineering at the interface with chemistry and medicine.” His research has helped create the field of tissue engineering and led to strategies for delivering protein and peptide drugs. Langer was the first person to engineer polymers to control the delivery of highmolecular-weight drugs for the treatment of diseases such as cancer and mental illness. He overturned the established thinking that controlled-release drug delivery would not work for large molecules such as peptides or proteins, which are very sensitive to their surroundings and can be degraded easily. He received numerous awards, including the 2006 National Medal of Science; the 2011 National Medal of Technology & Innovation; the 2012 Priestley Medal, the
American Chemical Society’s highest honor; the 2013 Wolf Prize in Chemistry; and the 2014 Kyoto Prize. He is an ACS Fellow. The queen will present Langer with the award later this year during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
MAGID ABOUGHARBIA WINS DRUG DISCOVERY AWARD Magid Abou-Gharbia, Laura H. Carnell Pro-
fessor of Medicinal Chemistry, an associate dean, and director of the Moulder Center for Drug Discovery Research at Temple University, is the recipient of the Grand Hamdan International Award in drug discovery. The award recognizes research breakthroughs that have the potential to have a major impact on health care delivery; it is one of the Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum Awards for Medical Sciences for 2013–14. The awards were presented in December by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, deputy ruler of Dubai and minister of finance for the United Arab Emirates, at the 8th Dubai International Conference for Medical Sciences. Abou-Gharbia is being recognized for his pioneering work in medicinal chemistry and the discovery of anticancer drugs such as Torisel and Bosulif, and antidepressants such as Effexor and Pristiq. In 2008, he founded the Moulder Center, which recently received $5 million. He is also a winner of the 2014 Philadelphia Business Journal Educator/Researcher of the Year Innovation Award. The innovation awards recognize the region’s top leaders in health care and the life sciences.
RICHARDS MEDAL TO HARRY GRAY Harry B. Gray, Arnold O. Beckman Profes-
sor of Chemistry and the founding director of the Beckman Institute at California Institute of Technology, is the recipient of the 2014 Theodore William Richards Medal Award, presented by the ACS Northeastern Section. Named in honor of the first U.S. Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, the award is given every two years for conspicuous achievement in chemistry and is the secCEN.ACS.ORG
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tion’s oldest and most prestigious award. Gray’s research interests include molecular orbital theory of inorganic molecules and complexes, bioinorganic chemistry, and more recently the development of renewable energy technologies. He will be honored during a local section meeting on March 5 at Harvard University.
REESHEDA GILBERT IS WCC’S OVERCOMING CHALLENGES AWARDEE Reesheda Gilbert, a senior biochemistry
major at Kennesaw State University, in Georgia, is the winner of the ACS Women Chemists Committee’s Overcoming Challenges Award. She was honored at the fall 2014 ACS national meeting. The award recognizes a female chemistry undergraduate for overcoming hardship. Gilbert received a $250 prize and coverage of travel expenses to attend the national meeting in San Francisco, where she presented a talk.
CHEMICAL INFORMATION SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE Graduate students and postdocs in chemical information and related sciences are eligible to apply for scholarships from the ACS Division of Chemical Information (CINF). The scholarships, funded by the Royal Society of Chemistry, recognize scientific excellence and encourage student involvement. Up to three $1,000 scholarships will be awarded at the fall ACS national meeting in Boston. Applicants must be at an ACScertified college or university. Awardees will present a poster at the CINF welcoming reception during the national meeting. To apply, submit an abstract online at abstracts.acs.org by March 13 and notify Guenter Grethe, chair of the selection committee, at
[email protected]. Send a 2,000word abstract to Grethe by June 20 describing the work to be presented. LINDA WANG compiles this section.
Announcements of awards may be sent to
[email protected].
