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2012 ACS NATIONAL AWARD WINNERS Recipients are HONORED FOR CONTRIBUTIONS of major significance to chemistry EDITED BY SOPHIE L. ROVNER
vignettes of recipients of awards administered by the American Chemical Society for 2012. C&EN will publish the vignettes of the remaining recipients in the last February issue. A profile of Robert S. Langer, the 2012 Priestley Medalist, is scheduled to appear in the March 26 issue of C&EN along with his award address. Most of the award recipients will be honored at an awards ceremony that will be held on Tuesday, March 27, in conjunction with the spring ACS national meeting in San Diego. However, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar awardees will be honored at the fall ACS national meetinginPhiladelphia,Aug.19–23.
E. V. MURPHREE AWARD IN INDUSTRIAL & ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY Sponsored by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering The E. V. Murphree Award is one of the few given by ACS that primarily honors the work of chemical engineers. The award aims “to stimulate fundamental research in industrial and engineering chemistry, the development of chemical engineering principles, and their application to industrial processes.” And among the esteemed engineers who have received this award, Michael F. Doherty, professor and chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, fits right in. Doherty “Michael Doherty is a rare ideal chemical engineer who is able to take fundamental concepts from chemistry, combine them with advanced mathematics, and then establish new and useful
quantitative methods for modern process design,” says John M. Prausnitz, a professor in the Graduate School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at UC Berkeley and himself a winner of this award, in 1979. The distinguished list of past winners is one reason Doherty describes winning this award as thrilling. “Many of my scientific heroes have won this award. And I have known many of them personally,” he tells C&EN. A college-aged Doherty was inspired to begin his career in chemical engineering by what was going on in the chemical industry in the late 1960s. “There was a real buzz for new products that the industry was producing,” he says. “It was like the iPad and iPhone back then. “The industry was transitioning from being fuels-based to making much more complicated molecules,” he continues. “New kinds of polymers and materials for cars, buildings, and furniture. Molecules such as esters and amides.” Building those kinds of molecules and commercially making them—and particularly separating them— was challenging, he says. The problem of complex separations— for example, those of mixtures with complex phase behavior or azeotropes or in which reactions are also taking place—was a focus of Doherty’s while he was a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1977 to 2000. Early in his career at UMass, Doherty says, one of his graduate students, Domingos Barbosa, worked out “an absolutely beautiful thermodynamic theory of what happens when you carry out reactions and separations simultaneously.” Doherty says, “This work really moved my research focus in that direction, where we worked for 15 years.” It was also during his time at UMass COURTESY OF MICHAEL DOH ERT Y
FOLLOWING IS THE EIGHTH set of
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that Doherty collaborated with Michael F. Malone, now vice chancellor for research and engagement at the university, on many research projects and in particular on a textbook that colleagues call “acclaimed” and “definitive.” The textbook,“Conceptual Design of Distillation Systems,” incorporates Doherty and Malone’s years of research in complex separations systems into a distillation design methodology. Doherty is now at UC Santa Barbara, where he joined the faculty in 2000 and became chair of the chemical engineering department in 2008. His research now focuses on crystal engineering, particularly on new methods to predict and control crystal shape, which has applications in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries. Doherty received a B.Sc. from Imperial College, University of London, in 1973, and a Ph.D. from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 1977, both in chemical engineering. Among his many honors, in 2008, Doherty was named one of the “100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era” by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Doherty will present the award address before the ACS Division of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry.—KIMBERLY TWAMBLY
GEORGE & CHRISTINE SOSNOVSKY AWARD FOR CANCER RESEARCH Sponsored by the George & Christine Sosnovsky Endowment Fund Trained as an organic chemist, Lawrence J. Marnett “followed his nose” into cancer research. During his graduate and postdoctoral studies, he became interested in the oxidation of membrane polyunsaturated fatty acids. “At the time, all focus in the carcinogenesis community was on the metabolism of foreign compounds to carcinogenic metabolites,” Marnett says. “There wasn’t much emphasis placed on the possibility that molecules generated in our own bodies might be carcinogenic.” Although unfamiliar with the methods needed for such research, he began planning experiments to test whether lipid oxidation products damage DNA and induce mutations. That work paid off. Marnett, 64, the Mary Geddes Stahlman Professor of Cancer Research and professor of biochemistry,
tor at Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology. He has been the editorin-chief of the American Chemical Society journal Chemical Research in Toxicology since its founding in 1987. In addition, he is a fellow of ACS and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Marnett will present the award address before the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry.—CELIA ARNAUD
AHMED ZEWAIL AWARD IN ULTRAFAST SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Sponsored by the Ahmed Zewail Endowment Fund Keith A. Nelson has made a career of being
in control. In his quest to understand how light interacts with matter, he has developed methods for controlling and manipulating laser pulses that have become indispensable to today’s spectroscopists. Using these methods, he is now controlling and manipulating atoms, ions, molecules, and materials to learn about their collective behavior in solids and liquids. Essentially, Nelson says, “I want to know how stuff moves around, what are the degrees of freedom involved.” For the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemistry professor, this can mean investigating light-initiated chemical reactions, structural and electronic changes in materials, and even collective motions in viscous liquids. “Keith is a true pioneer who has revolutionized Nelson ultrafast pulse-shaping techniques,” says Margaret M. Murnane, a University of Colorado, Boulder, physicist and the 2009 winner of the Zewail Award. In pulse shaping, scientists use diffraction gratings and other specialized optics to control the frequency and phase profile of an ultrafast, or femtosecond, laser pulse. Shaped beams, Nelson says, are powerful tools because they can selectively “tap” a
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molecule or crystalline solid, causing it to vibrate with particular modes. Researchers can then watch the molecule or material vibrate over time and use subsequent pulses to further manipulate its motion. Nelson, 58, was also the first to use pulse shaping to study the collective motion of atoms in crystals with a technique called impulsive stimulated Raman scattering. This method, first demonstrated in 1985, “is now used by many groups worldwide in applications spanning from physics to chemistry to materials to biology to nanoscience and sensing,” Murnane says. Nelson showed “coherent control” of materials with shaped laser light before the term was even coined, she adds. Since that time, Nelson has used the stimulated Raman scattering technique to generate intense terahertz waves in solids, and he has developed other pulse-shaping technology for multidimensional electronic spectroscopy. In addition, in the 1990s, his labproducedphotoacoustictechnologythat measures the thickness of thin-film materials with angstrom-level resolution. The microelectronics industry became especially interested in this development, so Nelson cofounded the firm Active Impulse Systems in 1995 to commercialize the technique. Eventually, the company was acquired by Philips Analytical. Nelson has also excelled at communicating science throughout his career, says Michael D. Fayer, a Stanford University chemist who was Nelson’s Ph.D. adviser. “His high level of excitement is contagious,” Fayer says. “It is impossible to be around him without being charged up with ideas, understanding, and a desire to go out and learn about nature. He is capable of explaining anything to anyone.” Nelson obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Stanford in 1976 and stayed there to earn a Ph.D. in 1981. After carrying out a postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1982, he joined the faculty at MIT, where he has been ever since. He is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. Nelson will present the award address before the ACS Division of Physical Chemistry.—LAUREN WOLF COURT ESY OF KEITH NELSON
T IM JO N ES/P O RT RA IT U R E
chemistry, and pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, is receiving the George & Christine Sosnovsky Award in recognition of research showing pathways by which inflammation leads to cancer and targeting the inflammation-related enzyme cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) for early detection of cancer. Marnett has “used unique approaches to design inhibitors of this critical enzyme and to determine the moMarnett lecular basis of their activities,” says Stephen S. Hecht, a professor of cancer prevention at the University of Minnesota. “Larry has made seminal contributions to both our understanding of the mechanisms by which inflammation predisposes to cancer and to utilizing this knowledge to develop new COX-2 targeting agents,” adds Andrew J. Dannenberg, a professor of medicine and director of the cancer center at Weill Cornell Medical College. Marnett was also the first to characterize the chemistry and biology of malondialdehyde-DNA adducts. “The seminal work with the endogenous carcinogen malondialdehyde has ranged from the chemical synthesis of adducts to the crystallographic studies of the interactions with DNA polymerases to the quantitation of such adducts in humans,” says F. Peter Guengerich, a professor of biochemistry at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. Marnett’s colleagues laud his interdisciplinary research. He “has uniquely combined state-of-the-art organic chemistry with molecular biology to produce a highly significant body of work that is likely to have a major impact on early detection and prevention of cancer,” Hecht says. Marnett received a B.S. in chemistry from Rockhurst College (now University) in Kansas City, Mo., in 1969. He then studied organic chemistry with Ned A. Porter at Duke University and received a Ph.D. in 1973. After postdoctoral appointments at Karolinska Institute, in Sweden, and Wayne State University, he was hired as an assistant professor of chemistry at Wayne State in 1975. In 1989, he moved to Vanderbilt as director of the A.B. Hancock Jr. Memorial Laboratory for Cancer Research. He served as the first associate director for research of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. Since 2002, he has been the direc-
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Sponsored by the Alpha Chi Sigma Fraternity and the Alpha Chi Sigma Educational Foundation Oleg V. Ozerov, a Texas A&M University
chemistry professor who studies synthetic organometallic chemistry and its applications in catalysis and energy-related problems, is being honored for the discovery of novel bond-making and bond-breaking reactions mediated by transition-metal and main-group compounds. When asked for advice for other young chemists, Ozerov says: “Do not be confused or intimidated by authority, apparent established wisdom, or any nonscience trappings. If you truly know what you are about, your ideas are just as valid as anybody else’s and it will be yourdeeds—experiments— that will prove you right or wrong. The boundaries in research are only there to be pushed.” At just 35, Ozerov, is already “one of the world’s leading organometallic chemists,” according to Alan S. Goldman, a chemistry professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Ozerov who investigates reactions between transition-metal complexes and organic molecules. Ozerov’s mechanistic work “affords some of the best insight into the fundamental reaction chemistry of small molecules with complexes of late-transition metals,” Goldman adds. He uses a system, the so-called PNP ligand—a bis(phosphinoaryl)amine—“that is superb for studying such chemistry.” “Oleg is a pioneer in the chemistry of PNP pincer complexes and can be credited for invigorating this field of research,” says fellow Texas A&M chemistry professor François P. Gabbaï. Ozerov’s studies “demonstrate how the rigidity and the modularity of PNP pincer ligands can be used to bring about novel reactivity and structures” by, for example, imparting unprecedented reactivity to late-transition metals. “The second area of major impact from Oleg’s laboratory pertains to the development of electrophilic main-group catalysts for the activation of C–F bonds by silylium ions,” Gabbaï says. “When these reactions
are carried out in the presence of an excess of triethylsilane, the system becomes catalytic and promotes the hydrodefluorination of a number of fluorinated substrates.” Possible applications include the destruction of air pollutants such as CFCs and HFCs. Other projects by Ozerov include Powering the Planet, a multi-investigator center sponsored by the National Science Foundation to study the direct conversion of sunlight into chemical fuel. His group is exploring new routes for splitting H2O into H2 and O2 using lessons learned in organotransition-metal chemistry. Ozerov was born in Novosibirsk, Russia. He earned a diploma in chemistry from the Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1998 and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry with Folami T. Ladipo at the University of Kentucky in 2000. After two years as a postdoc at Indiana University with Kenneth G. Caulton, Ozerov joined the faculty of Brandeis University as an assistant professor of chemistry. He was promoted to associate professor in 2006 and then moved to Texas A&M as a full professor in 2009. Ozerov’s honors and awards include a 2007 Camille Dreyfus TeacherScholar Award, a 2006 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a 2003 Research Innovation Award from Research Corporation. Ozerov will present the award address before the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry.—SOPHIE ROVNER KENDRA BEASLEY/TEXAS A&M
ACS AWARD IN PURE CHEMISTRY
JAMES T. GRADY-JAMES H. STACK AWARD FOR INTERPRETING CHEMISTRY FOR THE PUBLIC Sponsored by ACS The French writer Arsène Houssaye coined the term “forty-first seater” to refer to writers who, usually because they were rejected, never became members of the 40-seat Académie Française. They would include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne, and Jean-Paul Sartre, writers who over the years made way for the likes of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and other lesser-
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known essayists at the Palais de l’Institut de France, in Paris, seat of the grand Académie. This is not a unique injustice. At an informal annual meeting of winners of the James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award in Bar Harbor, Maine, for example, the question of “who should have won?” invariably arises, according to Michael Woods, a senior science writer at ACS and the 1978 winner of the award. Attendees of this summer’s reunion, however, will likely be able to proceed directly to the next question, because the 2011 winner is Paul Raeburn, whose name has long topped the list of paragons who hadn’t yet won. As the science editor of the Associated Press news wire service, a science and technology writer for Businessweek, a contributor to science programs on the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio, the author of several books, and a media critic for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Raeburn has been interpreting chemistry for an audience for more than 30 years. Raeburn’s educational background is in physics, political science, and jazz piano. He received a bachelor of science degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology but decided against a career in the field. He went to work as a pianist, which, he said, created the perfect environment for becoming a writer: “a meager salary and nothing to do during the day.” Raeburn’s passion for writing developed, he says, when he landed a full-time position as a general assignment reporter at the Lowell Sun in Lowell, Mass., in the 1970s. “Because of my MIT background, they sent me to cover stories on the energy shortage and nuclear power plants,” he says. “I became a science writer by virtue of my assignments.” Challenging the stereotype of the scientist as an aloof, elitist technocrat disdainful of the public’s ability to understand technical matters, Raeburn says he sees most scientists as adept at communication and anxious to reach out. “My entire career has been built on the willingness of scientists to take a lot of time—hours—to explain complicated subjects,” he says, noting that an increasing number of scientists have succeeded at skipping the middleman: “Where Carl Sagan once stood, a thousand blogs now bloom.” Raeburn himself blogs, in addition to teaching at Florida Atlantic University and freelancing for various journals, most recently Discover. If Raeburn, who is 61, is a latecomer to the convocation of Grady-Stack recipients,
JAMES FLACK NORRIS AWARD IN PHYSICAL ORGANIC CHEMISTRY Sponsored by the ACS Northeastern Section Hans J. Reich, 68, a professor of chemistry
at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is being recognized for his contributions to the understanding of the structure of main-group organometallic reagents, which are organic compounds that contain carbon-metal bonds. “Reich draws on his mastery of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to design experiments that provide unprecedented insight concerning the structure of organolithium reagents, their dynamic behavior in solution, and their mechanisms of reaction,” says Robert J. McMahon, a professor of chemistry at UW Madison. Organolithium reagents are among the most commonly used reagents in smallscale chemistry, Reich says. “In contrast to a number of the other common metals, lithium is a nucleus that is very suitable for NMR spectroscopy,” he notes. “Lithium spectra are very rich in information. One could gain a lot of understanding about these reagents by carefully examining them.” Reich says a major turning point in his research came when his lab purchased a 360-MHz superconducting NMR spectrometer. “We were very fortunate because we had an NMR spectrometer that could go to unusually low temperatures,” says Reich. “All of a sudden, we started seeing lots of stuff that we had really struggled to see before.” Reich says that running an NMR spectrometer at extremely low temperatures helps slow reactions down so researchers can see what is going on with more clarity, much like slowing down a movie so you can watch it frame by frame. “Most people consider –110 °C to be a really low temperature,” says Reich. “We’ve gone down to –160 °C and gotten decent NMR spectra.”
One of his major discoveries involved the reactivity of n-butyllithium. Researchers had believed the dimer of n-butyllithium was roughly 10 times more reactive than the tetramer. But using lowtemperature NMR spectroscopy, Reich determined the dimer was 138 million times more reactive than the tetramer. “This was really an eyeopener, because people had assumed that these things were minimally competitive, and we showed that there was no contest between these two species,” Reich says. “People had been making decisions about how you do reactions based on incorrect knowlReich edge about what’s going on in these solutions.” Reich was born in Danzig, Germany, in 1943, during World War II. His father spent two years in France as a prisoner of war. When Reich was seven years old, his family immigrated to Canada, where his father
found work as a butcher and his mother became a seamstress in a jeans factory. Reich earned a B.Sc. in chemistry from the University of Alberta in 1964. He went on to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1968 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he worked for Nobel Laureate Donald J. Cram. Reich then completed two postdocs, the first in John D. Roberts’ lab at California Institute of Technology, and the second at Harvard University with Nobel Laureate Robert B. Woodward. Reich joined the chemistry department at UW Madison as an assistant professor in 1970. He was promoted to associate professor in 1976 and full professor in 1979. His wife, Ieva L. Reich, is also on the chemistry faculty, serving as a senior lecturer. Reich will present the award address before the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry.—LINDA WANG IEVA R EICH
he is unfazed. His experience has shown him that recognition often eludes the accomplished. Take chemists. “They are the unsung heroes,” he says. “A lot of what they do is so quickly incorporated into our daily lives that it is easy to miss the extent of their achievement.” Raeburn will present the award address during a presidential event on Communicat ing Chemistry to the Public.—RICK MULLIN
ME E T I N GS
Central Regional Meeting Call For Papers The 43rd Central Regional Meeting (CERM 2012) of the American Chemical Society will be held at the Henry Hotel (formerly the Ritz-Carlton) in Dearborn, Mich., on June 5–9. The Detroit Section, which will host the meeting as part of its centennial celebration, requests papers for symposia covering advanced battery chemistry; chemical education; chemical aspects of alternative energy; analytical, biological, computational, environmental, inorganic, organic, physical, and polymer chemistry; and more. Abstracts may be submitted online through the CERM 2012 website at 2012cerm.sites.acs.org. The deadline for abstract submission is April 16. In addition to symposia and workshops devoted to all branches of chemistry, the technical program will include undergraduate research symposia, an exposition showcasing products and materials from a wide range of vendors, and technical and career development workshops.
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Special events will include plenary lectures, a Women Chemists Committee luncheon, a Younger Chemists Committee luncheon, an ice cream social with ACS governance, and a Detroit 100th anniversary dinner. An awards ceremony will honor the recipients of the Stanley C. Israel Regional Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences, the ACS Division of Chemical Education Central Region Award for Excellence in High School Teaching, and the E. Ann Nalley Regional Award for Volunteer Service to the American Chemical Society. Nomination guidelines and further information about these awards can be found on the meeting website. Advance registration for the meeting closes on May 22. Regular registration will continue through June 9. Please visit the CERM 2012 website for registration and contact information, useful Web links, and up-to-date details on events as they become available.
