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2007 ACS NATIONAL AWARD WINNERS Recipients are HONORED FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
of major significance to chemistry VIGNETTES OF THE SECOND SET of recipients of awards administered by the American Chemical Society for 2007 are presented. G&EN will publish vignettes of the remaining recipients in successive January and February issues. An article on George M. Whitesides, 2007 Priestley Medalist, is scheduled to appear in the March 26 issue of G&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 233rd AGS national meeting in Chicago. The Arthur C. Cope Scholar awardees will be honored at the 234th ACS national meeting in Boston, Aug. 19-23.
RONALD BRESLOW AWARD FOR ACHIEVEMENT IN BIOMIMETIC CHEMISTRY Sponsored by the Breslow Endowment Frangois Diederich, professor in the department of chemistry and applied biosciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, has received international acclaim for his seminal work in chemical biology and the chemistry of carbon-rich, fullerene-based, and acetylene-based advanced materials. Diederich has made many contributions to understanding weak interactions and solvent effects in chemical and biological complexation. In the 1980s, he was one of the first scientists to investigate the complexation of neutral organic molecules in water, performing quantitative binding studies with elegantly designed, potent cyclophane receptors. He prepared receptors that dissolve cholesterol rapidly and efficiently in aqueous solution. Around 1990, calorimetric studies in his laboratory showed that tight apolar complexation in water is strongly enthalpydriven. Since this work, enthalpy-driven
apolar complexation, also referred to as the "nonclassical hydrophobic effect," has been recognized in numerous biological binding events. "In the mid-1990s, Diederich introduced a logical extension to his previously detailed molecular recognition studies with synthetic receptors by addressing molecular recognition with biological receptors using structure-based approaches," observes J. Fraser Stoddart, Fred Kalvi Professor of NanoSystems Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Increasingly, his research is addressing targets from Third World diseases, such as AIDS, malaria, shigellosis, and sleeping sickness, that are somewhat neglected by the First World pharmaceutical industry. "Diederich has also profoundly influenced the development of dendrimer chemistry," Stoddart notes. "In his studies on functional dendrimers, he positions cofactors, such as iron hemes, apolar cyclophane Diederich building sites, or hydrogenbonding clefts, as the initiator cores into the centers of dendrimers. In these mimics of globular proteins, the functional core is efficiently shielded from the bulk solvent and, in aqueous solution, encounters a unique microenvironment of reduced polarity." Born in Luxembourg in 1952, Diederich studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, where he received his doctorate in 1979. He then moved to UCLA as a postdoctoral fellow for two years before taking up a position as research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, in Heidelberg, in 1981. Four years later, he returned to UCLA, where he eventually became professor of organic and bioorganic chemistry. He took up his present position in 1992. "After moving to ETH Zurich, I recogWWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
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nized that studies in chemical molecular recognition in hundreds of laboratories worldwide had generated enormously broad and in-depth insights into molecular recognition principles," he says. "However, while I was consulting with the pharmaceutical industry, it also became apparent to me that this work only had limited impact on approaches such as structure-based lead generation and optimization. "It became clear to me that, in order to enhance my impact on medicinal chemistry developments, it would be desirable to add molecular recognition studies with biological receptors to our program. Until then, it had been concerned with biomimetic systems—including dendritic model systems for globular proteins. We started to employ a structure-based approach to design a new class of nonpeptidic inhibitors of thrombin. As a result, the attention to our work in chemical and biological recognition from the medical chemistry community increased rapidly." Diederich has received numerous awards and honors, including the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar award, in 1992, and the Alan Berman Research Publication Award, U.S. Department of the Navy, in 1994. He is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of the Arts 8c Sciences, has published more than 500 research papers, and ranks consistently among the 25 most cited chemists worldwide, according to the Institute for Scientific Information. He is also a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including Angewandte Chemie, for which he currently serves as chairman of the editorial board. The award address will be presented before the Division of Organic Chemistry.-MICHAEL FREEMANTLE
E. BRIGHT WILSON AWARD IN SPECTROSCOPY Like many future chemists, Michael D. Fayer, David Mulvane Ehrsam & Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, got his start in the field by experimenting with pyrotechnics as a child. He was further intrigued by chemistry when he got interested in pho-
tography as a teenager. But it wasn't until college that he found his calling studying the physics of molecular systems. Decades later, Fayer has a highly successful career studying molecular and chemical problems using nonlinear optical techniques, such as transient gratings, photon echoes, and vibrational echoes. It is for developing and applying these nonlinear techniques to molecular dynamics and excitation transport in complex condensed matter system that he is being honored. "It is a great honor to have my work recognized and to have the impact on chemistry of my developments of ultrafast nonlinear optical spectroscopy appreciated," Fayer says. "I feel that this award is a tribute to the brilliant graduate students and postdocs I Fayer have had over many years who are responsible for the successful research emanating from the Fayer labs." Galled a world leader in the field of condensed-phase spectroscopy and dynamics, Fayer has made lasting, seminal contributions to the microscopic descriptions of complex molecular liquids, glasses, and proteins. He has published more than 350 papers on his research, which, according to a colleague, has "in many ways changed the way we study and think about complex organic matter." Since the late 1970s, Fayer has been developing the transient grating technique to measure dynamics in molecular systems, such as excitation and exciton transport; acoustic and thermal phenomena; and orientational relaxation in supercooled liquids, liquid crystals, and lipid bilayers. This method has become the most widely used nonlinear optical technique in chemistry. Another key area of research for Fayer is photon echo experiments, which he used to demonstrate in detail the relationship between optical dephasing and hole burning in amorphous materials. This work served as the basis for the new field of characterizing the structural dynamics of amorphous and biological materials over timescales ranging from picoseconds to hours. Perhaps Fayer's most important single research accomplishment came about a decade ago, when his lab did the first ultrafast infrared vibrational echo experiment. The group recently expanded its research in this
area to two-dimensional vibrational echo chemical-exchange studies of complex formation and molecular isomerization. "Fayer is one of the most creative and innovative researchers in experimental condensed matter physical chemistry today," says colleague Mostafa A. El-Sayed, a chemistry professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. "In large part due to his work, ultrafast nonlinear and coherent spectroscopic techniques such as transient gratings and photon echoes are now used everywhere and have become the most powerful techniques for studying fast molecular processes." Fayer, 59, received a B.S. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969. He continued on there to earn a Ph.D. in 1974. He joined the faculty at Stanford in 1974 and rose through the ranks to his current position. Among his honors is the 2000 Earl K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy. The award address will be presented before the Division of Physical Chemistry.-SUSAN MORRISSEY
ACS AWARD FOR ENCOURAGING DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS INTO CAREERS IN THE CHEMICAL SCIENCES Sponsored by the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation Robyn E. Hannigan "is a leader in promoting diversity by mentoring underrepresented groups," says Scott W. Reeve, an associate professor of chemistry at Arkansas State University. And, he adds, she has also taken the lead in "offering research opportunities and providing the intellectual force behind diversity initiatives." Over a short period, Hannigan, associate professor of chemistry at Arkansas State, set up two National Science Foundationfunded programs that offer undergraduates research experience. The first, begun in 2000 while she was a postdoctoral fellow at Old Dominion University, encourages minority participation in biogeochemistry. This urban university with a high proporWWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
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tion of minority students still continues the program, despite Hannigan's move to a tenure-track position at Arkansas State. At Arkansas State in 2004, Hannigan inaugurated RISE, a program for research internships in science for the environment. Both RISE and the program at Old Dominion are "designed to pair a minority student with a mentor to work in a research lab over the summer," explains Old Dominion professor of oceanography Cynthia M. Jones. Hannigan, 41, comes by her mentoring instinct naturally but also with a little nudge from a former professor who took a then-struggling undergraduate under his wing. "Had it not been for that one professor, I would not be where I am today," Hannigan says. "I always felt that if I ever had the chance to give that kind of support to another student, I would." And give back, she does. Asish R. Basu, her research adviser at the University of Rochester, where she received her Ph.D. in geochemistry, describes her research lab at Arkansas State as a virtual United Nations of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. "These students, some representing various disadvantaged groups, are learning to do state-of-the-art research in the chemical sciences," Basu says. Reeve calls Hannigan's research accomplishments at Arkansas State, a regional midsize institution, "remarkable." Hannigan, he says, "has a passion as well as a genuine gift for doing high-quality science." Because of "her tremendous communications skills, she is able to excite this passion and enthusiasm among her students," Reeve adds. He also points to her passion for promoting diversity. Hannigan, he notes, served as director of Arkansas State's McNair Achievement Program, which helps prepare underrepresented undergraduates for successful doctoral study. She now is director of the graduate program in environmental science. "Beyond the classroom, Hannigan actively participates in mentoring minorities through her volunteer work with the NSF leadership panel for Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and with the Society for Advancement of Ghicanos 8c Native Americans in Science," Jones says. When asked what she does for fun beyond chemistry, she facetiously answers: "Is there something outside of chemistry?" Then, she admits to being "a big fan of video games."
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In addition to a Ph.D., Hannigan has two M.S. degrees in geochemistry. She received the first one in 1994 from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and the second one a year later from the University of Rochester. She is a member of the National Research Council's Board on Earth Sciences & Resources, and she also serves on NSF's Bio Directorate REU LeadHannigan ership Council. In 2001, she became an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, and in 1995, she was honored as a Ford Foundation Minority Dissertation Fellow. The award address will be presented before the Division of Geochemistry.—LOIS EMBER
GEORGE A. OLAH AWARD IN HYDROCARBON OR PETROLEUM CHEMISTRY Sponsored by the George A. Olah Endowment Bruce E. Koel "has had a major impact on hydrocarbon chemistry," says John L. Falconer, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Colorado. And his work "has had a major impact on others" as indicated by his large number of invited talks and a citation rate of approximately 24 citations per paper. KoePs career began with a solid background in surface science. His papers are considered important contributions to the surface science literature. Next, he began integrating surface science techniques into the study of fundamental surface chemical problems relevant to many important technologies including catalysis and electrochemistry. A principal contribution was his investigation of the chemistry and catalysis on well-defined bimetallic alloy surfaces. Chemisorption and surface reactions of dozens of small molecules, hydrocarbons, and intermediates have now been studied under ultra-high-vacuum (UHV) conditions, where the powerful spectroscopic tools of modern surface science can be utilized. In addition, these studies are being correlated with measurements, in his lab, of the high-pressure catalytic hydrogenation of crotonaldehyde and cyclohexanone
over these same surfaces. KoePs work to discover, characterize, and utilize ordered surface alloys (intermetallic compounds) grown on single-crystal substrates has greatly improved the understanding of fundamental principles that underpin alloy chemistry and that can be used to interpret or predict their catalytic properties. "His work comprises the most detailed and complete exploration of the chemistry on platinum-tin alloy surfaces," notes David W. Goodman, a professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University. "Other than a few studies on oxidation of PtSn alloys, there was only the early work of Sachtler's on H2 and ethylene adsorption on polycrystalline material when Bruce began. His most important contributions have derived from chemisorption studies on these surface alloys, correlating surface structure with chemisorption properties." In other studies tackling fuel-cell electrode chemistry, Koel has shown that PtSn alloys are remarkably weakly interacting with organic compounds given the oxophilicity of tin. Methanol, ethanol, water, and even nitromethane are reversibly adsorbed under UHV conditions. His chemisorption studies have led to the discovery of novel catalytic processes occurring in UHV. The two most significant aspects of these studies are the utilization of ordered surface alloys to provide a clear probe of site requirements for adsorption and reactions, showing clearly the importance of the threefold hollow site to hydrocarbon reactions, and the discovery of the importance of a modifier precursor in controlling adsorption kinetics on chemi- Koel cally modified or bimetallic surfaces. Koel, 51, received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1976 from Emporia State University, in Kansas, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Texas, Austin. He is the recipient of numerous awards and has trained 43 graduate students and 23 postdoctoral fellows. The award address will be presented
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before the Division of Colloid & Surface Chemistry.-WILLIAM SCHULZ
NAKANISHI PRIZE Sponsored by the Nakanishi Prize Endowment For Hung-wen Liu, just looking out at the world has been enough to spark his curiosity. "Why is this plant red? Why does something smell a particular way?" These are the sorts of questions he says have always occurred to him. "That's what brought me to work on chemistry, especially natural products." Liu, 54, began what has become a lifelong research trajectory in 1976, when he started graduate work in the Columbia University laboratory of revered natural products chemist Koji Nakanishi, now 80 years old and still at it. And this year, Liu, or Ben to those who know him, has been recognized as a leader in his field by being named the winner of the 2007 Nakanishi Prize. Established in 1995 by Nakanishi's students and colleagues, the prize is given in odd years by the American Chemical Society and in even years by the Chemical Society of Japan. Now, Liu is abioorganic chemist in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Texas, Austin. His work in natural products chemistry, biosynthesis, and mechanistic investigations has centered on the quest to elucidate and understand nature's strategies for making biologically important structures. "Ben's work is characterized by creativity and an ability to work on extremely difficult, unsolved problems," says Peter Schultz of Scripps Research Institute. For example, Liu has found ways to investigate the mechanisms of enzymatic transformations that involve exquisitely fleeting radical intermediates. In one particular project, Schultz notes, Liu was able to show that the medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase enzyme perpetrates two successive electron transfers. Schultz's and Liu's paths first crossed when both were postdocs in Christopher Walsh's laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1980s. When Liu landed his first professorship in 1984 in the chemistry department of the
University of Minnesota, he combined his background in natural products chemistry from his days in Nakanishi's laboratory with the enzymology and protein chemistry that he mastered in Walsh's shop. With this foundation, Liu has been taking on what to him is one of biological chemistry's most intriguing traits: to start with simple chemical building blocks, such as sugar molecules, and end up with enormous molecular diversity and complexity. One way that Liu has been leveraging his particular expertise in the biosynthesis of unusual sugars is his work with macrolide antibiotics whose biological actions frequently depend on the type and location of sugar components. Liu has cloned genes involved in sugar biosynthesis and inserted them in bacteria, which then manufacture new antibiotic candidates. In an era when traditional antibiotics are losing their effectiveness, Liu rates the quest for novel antibiotics Liu as one of the most important jobs a chemist can embrace. Liu is thickly involved in the entire scientific enterprise. Under his wing as the George H. Hitchings Regents Chair in Drug Design are some two-dozen graduate students and postdocs. He is a member of many scientific societies, an organizer of conferences, a grant reviewer, and an editor or adviser for a range of scientific journals. Among the awards he has received is ACS's Horace S. Isbell Award in 1993 for his work in carbohydrate chemistry. When asked what accomplishment makes him most proud, Liu says "the best things have yet to come." It's an optimistic sentiment that jibes with his middle name, Ben. He assumed that name in the late 1970s as a student in Taiwan so that he could have something to write on application forms to the American universities he was looking into. "I always liked Benjamin Russel Franklin," Liu says. The award address will be presented before the Division of Organic Chemistry.-IVAN AMATO
ACS AWARD IN COLLOID & SURFACE CHEMISTRY Sponsored by Procter & Gamble William B. Russel, Arthur Marks '19 Professor and dean of the graduate school at Princeton University, was introduced to colloidal dispersions and rheology late in his graduate work in chemical engineering. But the encounter sparked a curiosity that has helped establish colloid science as a vital branch of modern engineering. The seeds of Russel's most cited work were planted when a Princeton graduate working at Wilmington, Del-based specialty chemicals company Hercules sent him photos of a strange phenomenon: aqueous dispersions that had been transformed by the presence of a common water-soluble polymer. Collaborating with Carol K. Hall, then a colleague at Princeton, and then-graduate student Alice P. Gast, Russel found that, as expected in molecular systems, the phase transition was gas-toliquid when the particles were smaller than three times the size of the polymer. But for larger particles, the disordered phase transformed directly into an ordered solid, an unusual twist that became the basis of a series of papers. "This elegant and insightful work is now a classic," says Pablo G. Debenedetti, Princeton Class of 1950 Professor in engineering and applied science. "By successfully explaining the physical basis for polymer-inducing phase separations in colloidal suspensions, it has become the basis for rational engineering design of polymer-stabilized colloidal suspensions, with applications ranging from pollution prevention to the formation of paints and cosmetics." Russel went on to make other significant theoretical and experimental contributions to the field of colloid science. His studies of hard-sphere suspensions, depletion phenomena, rheology and consolidation of colloidal gels, and WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
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latex film formation, all solidly grounded in theory, have spurred the entire discipline to rethink descriptions of colloidal phenomena, says Charles F. Zukoski, vice chancellor for research and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois. "His work in this arena predates the craze in nanomaterials but laid the crucial foundation necessary for much current work in nanomaterial self-assembly research and development," Zukoski notes. Over the past two decades, Russel has become increasingly involved with the administrative side of graduate education. The first step was his appointment as chair of the department of chemical engineering in 1987, a position he held until 1996, when he became the director of the Princeton Materials Institute. In 2002, his role expanded even further when he was named dean of Princeton's graduate school. That shift into administration has still left space for research. Currently, Russel is researching colloidal film formation and patterning of thin polymer films. Russel, 61, graduated from Rice University in 1969 with a B. A. and a master's of chemical engineering. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1973 a n d joined Princeton's department of chemical engineering a year later. He has served on the editorial board of a number of colloid science and engineering journals and has been honored throughout his career, including elections to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. The award address will be presented before the Division of Colloid & Surface Chemistry.-LISAJARVIS
ACS AWARD IN INORGANIC CHEMISTRY Sponsored by theAldnch Chemical Co. After nearly a half century of service to Ohio State University, Sheldon G. Shore is being honored for his pioneering work in the area of boron hydrides, metal cluster carbonyls, and lanthanide transition-metal systems. "He is a modest person with an exquisite sense of humor whose life is devoted to inorganic chemistry," says University of Notre Dame chemistry professor Thomas P. Fehlner. A member of Ohio State's chemistry department since 1957 and currently a Dis-
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tinguished Professor of Mathematical 8c Physical Sciences and the Charles H. Kimberly Professor, Shore is the author of over 270 scientific publications and 12 patents. "There are few modern chemists who have contributed so much to the development of syntheses and fundamental concepts in inorganic chemistry," Fehlner remarks. Shore is a key member of a community of chemists whose careers were influenced by the space race in the 1950s. The search for rocket fuels led to an increase in research on boron hydrides. "Though boranes were never destined to find major application as fuels, chemistry in general owes a great deal to the opening up of their chemistry, to which Shore has made a series of very significant, seminal contributions," says Ken Wade, a chemistry professor at Durham University, in England. Within a month of Shore's arrival at Ohio State, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to be put into orbit. "The space race was on, and general support of scientific research in the U.S. increased," Shore recalls. "I was able to obtain continuous support from the National Science Foundation for a number of years." His initial research at Ohio State dealt with cyclic boron nitrogen, boron oxygen, and boron sulfur compounds. "I came across a cylinder of pentaborane, a boron hydride with little-known chemistry at the time. And this was the beginning of an intensive program in the study of pentaborane and its derivatives," Shore says. This work, he explains, resulted in rational, high-yield syntheses of some of the rarer boron hydrides that previously were only obtained in small yields. The availability of boron hydrides, Shore says, led to extensive studies including determination of relative Br0nsted acidities of bridging hydrogens as a function of boron cage size, fluxional properties of bridging hydrogens, and syntheses of boron hydride anion analogs of carbocations and metallaborane complexes. The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed intense activity by organometallic chemists in the study of transition metal carbonyl clusters. "The relationship between boron hydrides and the cluster compounds was becoming increasingly apparent, and I entered Shore
the field, bringing with me techniques and concepts honed from my boron hydride experience," Shore says. His work included the syntheses and study of a number of new ruthenium carbonylate anions and boron metal cluster systems, including a study of the mechanism of "water gas shift catalysis" by [HRu 3 (CO) n ]-. In the 1990s, Shore's focus shifted to the preparation and study of extended arrays containing combinations of lanthanides and transition metals. "A number of systems of new structural types have been prepared and characterized, and I am now engaged in converting these materials to heterometallic nanoparSinay tides on oxide surfaces as heterogeneous catalysts," Shore says. The award address will be presented before the Division of Inorganic Chemistry.-GLENN HESS
CLAUDE S. HUDSON AWARD IN CARBOHYDRATE CHEMISTRY Sponsored by National Starch & Chemical This year's Claude S. Hudson Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry goes to a researcher who has introduced and developed important new synthetic methods in the carbohydrate field, including the synthesis of a key fragment of the commercial anticoagulant heparin. The awardee is Pierre Sinay, professor emeritus of organic chemistry at Pierre & Marie Curie University and at Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. Sinay, 68, earned a degree in chemical engineering from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Industries Chimiques (ENSIC), in Nancy, France, in 1961, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Nancy five years later. After research fellowships at Harvard University and Paris South University, in Orsay, France, he became an associWWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
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ate professor of biochemistry at the University of Orléans, in France, in 1969, and was promoted to professor in 1972. In 1986, he moved to the two Paris institutions, where he is now active as professor emeritus. Sinay is a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Sinay's first postdoctoral research fellowship was in the group of Harvard professor (now professor emeritus) of biological chemistry Roger W. Jeanloz. As Sinay's supervisor during his postdoctoral studies, Jeanloz notes, "I found him to be not only an excellent experimentalist but also a scientist full of new ideas in synthetic chemistry and in the application of synthetic compounds for the elucidation of biological problems." A historical achievement in synthetic methodology was his group's discovery of glycoside formation via imidate intermediates. A subsequent modification of this technique by another researcher has become today's method of choice for the chemical synthesis of complex oligosaccharides. Another important breakthrough by Sinay and coworkers was their synthesis of a pentasaccharide fragment responsible for the antithrombotic properties of heparin. This pioneering work led to a much better understanding of heparin's drug properties by elucidating the importance of the conformational flexibility of L-iduronic acid for heparin's anticoagulant activity. To study the role of carbohydrates in different human blood types, the researchers also synthesized oligosaccharide determinants of these blood groups. Other methods and syntheses developed and carried out by Sinay and coworkers include a stereoselective method to convert glycals into anomeric spiro orthoesters; a samarium iodide-promoted ring contraction of carbohydrate derivatives; innovative syntheses of C-disaccharides as stable mimics of biologically active glycosides; and the use of di- and triisobutylaluminum for novel rearrangements of monosaccharides into carbocycles and for regioselective debenzylation. A remarkable recent followup was a regioselective and high-yielding double debenzylation of perbenzylated cyclodextrins, which paved the way to many new derivatives of potential utility. Among
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other research achievements, Sinay's group has also helped advance the chemistry of anomeric organometallic species. The award address will be presented before the Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry.-STU BORMAN
how automobile and industrial lubricants are designed and synthesized," notes colleague Hsueh-Chia Chang, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. "By using combinatorial high-throughput testing and molecular-level insight, she can judiciously select the plethora of additives and functional groups needed to tailor lubricants ACS AWARD IN INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY for different operating conditions. She designs lubricants like molecular biologists Sponsored by the ACS Division ofBusiness design new anticancer drugs." Development & Management She also was a key participant in the team effort to bring this important family Motor oil is an essential chemical product of products to successful commercializathat most people think about only every tion. Thefluidsare now present in a host of few thousand miles when it's time for an oil ExxonMobil products, including lubricants change. But thanks to chemists like Marfor new low-emission automobiles and for garet M. Wu, who think about oil all the various types of industrial machinery. time, lubricant products have continued to Wu, 56, was born and raised in Taiwan. improve over the years to meet the perforShe received a B.S. degree in chemical enmance needs of our new cars. gineering from Taipei Institute of TechnolWu, a senior scientific adviser at ogy in 1970. She then traveled to the U.S. ExxonMobil Research 8c Engineering, in for graduate studies and received a Ph.D. in Annandale, N.J., is being recognized as a physical organic chemistry from the Unitop industrial chemist for her "creative versity of Rochester in 1976. After a short and outstanding research contributions stint as a process chemist with American leading to breakthrough Cyanamid, Wu joined Mosynthetic lubricant prodbil's Petrochemicals Diviucts of considerable comsion in Edison, N.J., in 1978. mercial and environmental In 2002, she became the importance." first woman to be named In addition to synthetic to the prestigious rank of lubricants, Wu's research senior scientific adviser at has contributed significantExxonMobil. In addition ly to technology in areas to many internal company as diverse as polymer synawards, she received the thesis, homogeneous and Thomas Alva Edison Award heterogeneous catalysis, in 2005 from the New Jersey and zeolite chemistry. "The R8cD Council for her knowledge and exposure to accomplishments. science in different areas "I find the work of an early in my career has proWu industrial chemist to be imvided me a fertile ground portant and rewarding, befor developing synergies and novel solucause I can see the fruits of my labors," Wu tions that would not have been obvious if I observes. "Whether it's a product on the had focused only in one area," she says. shelf or a process to produce something For instance, in the early 1980s, Wu did useful, I know it's improving the quality pioneering work to produce ethylene from of life for many people in my own commethanol in high yields by using proprimunity and around the world." She adds etary zeolite catalysts. But her major disthat industrial chemists have evolved from covery came a few years later when she took working nearly alone in the lab to working advantage of her experience to develop a as part of a team of scientists from differnew class of synthetic oil hydrocarbon base ent areas to bring products to the market in stocks. These antiwearfluidsare used in the a fast-changing and competitive business Mobili with SuperSyn brand of synthetic environment. "That's always refreshing automotive engine oil and other products. and exciting," she says. They help improve engine oil life, reduce The award address will be presented beengine wear, and improve fuel economy. fore the Division of Business Development "Margaret has essentially revolutionized 8cManagement.-STEVE RITTER
et"",·."
Computational & Theoretical Chemistry Volume 39, Issue 2 Guest Editors: Emily A. Carter, Princeton University Peter J. Rossky, The University of Texas at Austin
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ince 1998, Accounts of Chemical Research has published special issues devoted to a single issue of unusual activity and significance. Review the latest Special Issues at http://puhs.acs.org/acr. Subscribers are invited to view the full text of all articles while free access to the abstracts is available to all.
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