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2013 ACS NATIONAL AWARD WINNERS Recipients are HONORED FOR CONTRIBUTIONS of major significance to chemistry EDITED BY SOPHIE L. ROVNER
recipients of awards administered by the American Chemical Society for 2013. C&EN will publish the remaining sets of vignettes in February and March issues. A profile of Peter J. Stang, the 2013 Priestley Medalist, is scheduled to appear in the April 8 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 April 9 in conjunction with the spring ACS national meeting in New Orleans. The Arthur C. Cope Scholar awardees will be honored at the fall ACS national meeting in Indianapolis, Sept. 8–12.
ALFRED BADER AWARD IN BIOINORGANIC OR BIOORGANIC CHEMISTRY Sponsored by the Alfred R. Bader Fund Natural product biosynthesis expert David E. Cane nearly missed his calling. As a young graduate student in E. J. Corey’s lab at Harvard University, he turned down the opportunity to explore the biosynthesis of steroids in favor of focusing on organic synthesis. Luckily, a second chance materialized in the form of a postdoc with Duilio Arigoni, an expert in the biosynthesis of terpene natural products at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH). Cane, now 68 and a chemistry professor at Cane Brown University, says he was instantly hooked: “I wanted to know how nature does organic chemistry.” Today, Cane is “one of the most accomplished and respected scientists in natural product biosynthesis in the world,” says
fellow natural products expert Chaitan Khosla of Stanford University, a longtime collaborator of Cane’s. “Over the past three decades he has made seminal contributions to our understanding of how polyketides, terpenes, and vitamin B-6 are synthesized in microorganisms.” But Cane’s influence has extended far beyond just these natural products. “The field of natural product biosynthetic chemistry has lately undergone a revolution as a result of the synergistic application of chemical and biological tools,” Khosla says. “Nobody has been more instrumental in setting the tone for this sea change than David E. Cane.” Cane agrees the tools of his trade have changed dramatically since he got his start. In the early 1970s, scientists typically would feed a labeled precursor to an organism, see what the organism spit out and where the compounds were labeled, and then take an educated guess at what chemistry might have transpired. As Cane began to build his lab at Brown, he championed the widespread utility of 13C nuclear magnetic resonance for biosynthetic investigations. Later he adopted recombinant DNA technology to make and customize enzymes involved in natural product biosynthesis; X-ray crystallography to better understand those enzymes’ structures; the tools of mechanistic enzymology to quench and dissect complex, multistep enzymatic reactions; and genomic sequencing methods to pinpoint the machinery that uncultured microbes use to make natural products. Cane credits his many collaborators— including Khosla, Washington State University plant biochemist Rodney Croteau, SUZANNE S. CANE
THESE VIGNETTES HIGHLIGHT several
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and University of Pennsylvania crystallographer David W. Christianson—for helping him take advantage of these tools. Cane’s collegiality was the key to those collaborations, colleagues note. Cane is quick to share information, reagents, and advice, says Salk Institute for Biological Studies’ Joseph P. Noel, an expert in the evolution of plant metabolism. “He’s more concerned with learning something new rather than who finished first.” A New York City native, Cane completed his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard. After a postdoc stint at ETH, he joined the faculty at Brown in 1973. Among his many other awards are the Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products, the Cope Scholar Award, and the Repligen Award in Chemistry of Biological Processes of the ACS Division of Biological Chemistry. But when asked about his most notable accomplishments, Cane points to coediting a 2003 book of letters his father sent his mother while serving in World War II, offering an eyewitness account of some of the most dramatic events of the war. Cane will present the award address before the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry.—AMANDA YARNELL
ACS AWARD FOR ENCOURAGING DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS INTO CAREERS IN THE CHEMICAL SCIENCES Sponsored by the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation When George H. Fisher reflects on why he became a chemist, he recalls his 10th-grade chemistry teacher, a retired Yale University-educated industrial chemist. “His enthusiasm inspired me and several of my classmates to go into chemistry and science,” Fisher explains. “It was his teaching methods and his interest in us as students that led me to take two years of chemistry, so I could do a research project with him and attend a summer science camp.” Fisher, 69, has provided that same encouragement, enthusiasm, and mentoring for nearly 40 years in academic classrooms and laboratories, working with university and high school students in Miami. Most of those students have been economically
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HERBERT C. BROWN AWARD FOR CREATIVE RESEARCH IN SYNTHETIC METHODS Sponsored by the Purdue Borane Research Fund and the Herbert C. Brown Award Endowment “John Hartwig’s research has fundamentally changed the practice of organic synthesis,” according to Scott E. Denmark of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). “His synthetic methods have revolutionized the way aromatic compounds are prepared, and he has shown how to connect mechanistic work with methodological advances.” Hartwig, Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, receives this year’s award “for the creative discovery and insightful de- Hartwig velopment of fundamentally new, broadly utilized, transition-metalcatalyzed reactions of common functional groups and unreactive C–H bonds.” Among his major contributions to synthetic chem-
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istry are novel aryl coupling and C–H functionalization reactions. Beginning in the early 1990s, Hartwig’s group developed coupling reactions of aryl halides and sulfonates with amines, alkoxides, and thiols—work that has facilitated the synthesis of a wide range of aromatic and heteroaromatic compounds. A key advance in this area was the team’s discovery that palladium complexes of hindered alkylphosphines catalyze the coupling of aryl chlorides and tosylates with amines. Hartwig and coworkers recently used such catalysts to combine aryl halides with ammonia for the first time, yielding primary arylamines. Beginning in the late 1990s, Hartwig also devised an innovative method for the coupling of aryl halides with enolates, a reaction that has become widely used industrially. He and his coworkers ultimately found that zinc enolates are the most general systems for carrying out enantioselective ketone α-arylations with this method. In the past decade or so, the group also has advanced the art of functionalizing C–H bonds of alkanes and arenes with boron reagents. The work began with site-selective functionalizations of alkyl chains to form linear alkylboronate esters. This led to new methods for functionalizing arenes to form arylboronate esters, which can then be converted to aryl ethers, amines, halides, nitriles, and perfluoroalkyl compounds. This chemistry has been widely adopted by other research groups for applications such as natural product synthesis. Hartwig, 48, received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry with high honors in 1986 from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1990 from UC Berkeley, where he worked with chemistry professors Robert G. Bergman and Richard A. Andersen. From 1990 to 1992 he was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Associate in chemistry professor Stephen J. Lippard’s group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1992, he joined the chemistry faculty at Yale University, where he served as Irénée DuPont Professor of Chemistry from 2004 to 2006. In 2006, he moved to UIUC as Kenneth L. Reinhart Jr. Professor of Chemistry. He accepted his current position at UC Berkeley in 2011. COURTESY OF JOHN HARTWIG
After graduation, Gonzalez began graduate school. But as a single father with two daughters, he found it tough financially. Today, thanks to Fisher’s mentorship, he is a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry. “Without his encouragement,” Gonzalez notes, “I would have been lost, not knowing what is out there and available for me and others to explore in chemistry.” Fisher received a B.S. in chemistry in 1965 from Rollins College, an M.S. in organic chemistry from the University of Florida in 1968, and a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Miami in 1972. In his spare time he enjoys classical music and word and number puzzles. Fisher will present the award address before the ACS Division of Chemical Education.—JEFF JOHNSON COURTESY OF GEORGE FISHER
disadvantaged minorities and underrepresented in science, Fisher says. He believes they can strongly benefit from discovering the power and opportunity in chemistry but lack the resources available to other students. In the mid-1970s, Fisher began working with students at the University of Miami, where he earned his Ph.D., and in 1988, he moved to the chemistry department at Barry University, where he is a professor of organic chemistry. Barry is a Hispanic-serving institution and is eligible for federal support, because more than Fisher one-quarter of its student body is Hispanic and one-half are considered low income. On average, Fisher mentors three undergraduate research students annually; currently two are underrepresented minorities or are economically disadvantaged. Altogether, he has mentored more than 100 research students and supported another 1,000-plus in his organic lecture and lab courses. He also has helped students find and apply for financial aid, internships, scholarships, graduate or professional programs, and jobs. Fisher has been involved in ACS’s Project SEED program since 1984 and is currently Project SEED coordinator in the ACS South Florida Section. Project SEED provides stipends for economically disadvantaged high school students to carry out chemistry-related summer research under the direction of an academic, industrial, or government lab researcher. “Instead of working at McDonald’s or Burger King,” Fisher explains, “students find meaningful research internships that advance their knowledge and experience and might lead to a college scholarship.” “There have been many success stories,” he says. He points to students who earned chemistry graduate degrees and became academic or business leaders, as well as those who have embarked on well-paying and interesting chemistry-related careers. One is Nathan Gonzalez, who was drawn into the Barry chemistry program through its chemistry club and ACS student chapter, which Fisher directs. Gonzalez soon joined ACS and Fisher’s research group. He presented research posters at ACS national meetings and received an ACS scholarship.
ACS NEWS
ACS AWARD IN POLYMER CHEMISTRY Sponsored by ExxonMobil Chemical Craig J. Hawker preferred the bench to
the desk during his undergraduate studies at the University of Queensland. “I liked math,” Hawker, director of the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says. “But I really liked the laboratory. What finally stuck with me was chemistry—doing science with my hands was the most fun.” Hawker’s enthusiasm for hands-on chemistry has grown into a prestigious and successful career. His research into dendrimer chemistry, block copolymer synthesis, and controlled free-radical polymerizations has had long-resonating effects on the field of polymer chemistry. He was the first to realize the power of applying click chemistry concepts to materials synthesis. Click chemistry is a reaction strategy in which molecular building blocks are designed to selectively and covalently “click” together to form larger constructions. Hawker His more than 400 publications have been heavily cited, with over 100 papers being cited at least 100 times. Hawker is not only a pioneer in “making stuff,” he is also practical—many of his findings have resulted in patents, and a number have reached commercial markets. Hawker’s work has found numerous applications as diverse as integrated cir-
cuits and polymer-based therapeutics. Hawker, 48, completed his Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry under Sir Alan R. Battersby at Cambridge University in 1988. He entered the field of polymeric materials later that year when he began postdoctoral research with Jean M. J. Fréchet at Cornell University. There, Hawker produced his groundbreaking work on dendrimers, developing a convergent growth approach to these macromolecular architectures. This desire to utilize cutting-edge synthetic strategies to prepare functional materials has remained a central theme in his research. After a research fellowship at the University of Queensland, in Australia, Hawker joined IBM as a research staff member in 1993. During his time with IBM, he won many academic and industrial awards for his work. He developed strategies for living polymerizations that enabled major approach advances in block copolymer lithography while also bringing the click chemistry approach to materials synthesis. In 2004, Hawker was attracted to the unique collaborative environment at UCSB and joined the university as a professor in the materials, chemistry, and biochemistry departments. UCSB “is a tremendous place for collaboration,” he says. “There are no barriers between groups or departments.” A recent highlight is his participation with UCSB researchers who are translating biological systems such as squid beaks, cuttlefish camouflage, and mussel adhesives into synthetic materials. “This is a unique opportunity to work with students from varied groups, many with more than one supervisor,” Hawker says. “It allows us to do things that we couldn’t do otherwise.” Although modest when discussing his own achievements, Hawker speaks with great pride about those of his colleagues and coworkers. “I have had the best of luck in working with so many exciting and enthusiastic people and through this have come to realize that one of our primary roles in academia is to be excellent mentors and advocates for younger scientists starting out in the field,” he explains. In his free time, he likes to teach anyone who will listen the rules of cricket and Australian Rules Football. Hawker will present the award adCOURTESY OF CRAIG HAWKER/UCSB
“John Hartwig has pioneered three of the most widely used transition-metal-catalyzed reactions that have been reported in the past 15 years,” Denmark says. “These developments have transformed modern synthetic organic chemistry and have now achieved strategy-level and name-reaction status.” Hartwig’s record of achievement in synthetic methodology “is unsurpassed in creativity, productivity, and impact,” adds Stanford University chemistry professor Paul A. Wender. Hartwig will present the award address before the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry.—STU BORMAN
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dress before the ACS Division of Polymer Chemistry.—NADER HEIDARI
E. B. HERSHBERG AWARD FOR IMPORTANT DISCOVERIES IN MEDICINALLY ACTIVE SUBSTANCES Sponsored by Merck Research Laboratories Like many good chemists who were raised in the 1950s, Bruce E. Maryanoff, 66, was first drawn to his chosen field by experimenting with a Gilbert chemistry set. His fate was sealed at a family gathering when a chemical engineer uncle showed Maryanoff how to melt an aspirin tablet. The pungent odor that his “experiment” emitted was “powerfully amazing” and offended just about everyone there, Maryanoff recalls. The young scientist was hooked. Maryanoff is best known for the discovery of the anticonvulsant topiramate, which has been sold by Johnson & Johnson under the brand name Topamax since 1996. Approved to treat epilepsy and migraines, the drug brought in peak annual sales of $2 billion. Although he’s enjoyed an illustrious career as a medicinal chemist, Maryanoff didn’t initially set out to invent drugs. While he was a postdoctoral fellow in Kurt Mislow’s lab at Princeton University, Maryanoff was sure his next step would be a job in academia. By the time he was wrapping up there, the U.S. was in the grips of the nasty recession of 1973–74. Maryanoff read a C&EN article suggesting that universities would be experiencing funding cutbacks, so he began to contemplate a career in industry. Health care seemed to be a field with longevity, and Maryanoff recalls sending upward of 40 letters to pharmaceutical companies in search of a job. Most firms never replied, he says, but eventually a small outfit called McNeil Laboratories— owned by a bigger outfit called Johnson & Johnson—offered him a position. Maryanoff was initially hired to do process chemistry. After a year, he reminded his bosses of his keen interest in drug discovery and they soon moved him into that function. Within his first five years of working as a drug hunter, he, along with his collaborators, struck upon topiramate. During his 35 years at J&J, Maryanoff and his colleagues were able to move 23
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F. ALBERT COTTON AWARD IN SYNTHETIC INORGANIC CHEMISTRY Sponsored by the F. Albert Cotton Endowment Fund Gregory H. Robinson, Franklin Professor
of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, tends to stand out in a crowd. His physical presence is more suggestive of a football player than a mild-mannered chemistry professor. Yet he has proven himself quite capable at being both. As a linebacker at Jacksonville State University, Robinson once used his size, speed, and agility to put fear in opposing teams’ quarterbacks. He earned United
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experimental realization of metalloaromaticity—and the synthesis of a provocative compound described as containing a gallium-gallium triple bond. After earning a B.S. in chemistry in 1980 from Jacksonville State, Robinson received a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1984 from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, under the guidance of Jerry L. Atwood. During his final year at Alabama, he was selected Graduate Student of the Year. Robinson began his career at Clemson University, then joined the faculty at Georgia in 1995. Robinson has served on the editorial boards of Organometallics (2004–07) and C&EN (2001–07) and currently serves on the editorial board of Inorganic Chemistry. He is a recipient of the Southern Chemist Award, presented by the ACS Memphis Section, and the 2004 Percy L. Julian Award, which is the highest honor bestowed by the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists & Chemical Engineers. Robinson also is a recipient of the Charles H. Herty Medal from the ACS Georgia Section (2008); the Lamar Dodd Award, which is the highest research award presented by the University of Georgia (2010); and an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (2012). “His synthetic and structural work has provided a much-needed basis and stimulus for main-group-element chemical research in general, a basis that goes beyond his personal research goals and provides textbook examples for new science,” notes organometallic chemist Marcetta Y. Darensbourg of Texas A&M University. “And the reach of his chemistry continues to expand.” Robinson will present the award address before the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry.—STEVE RITTER COURTESY OF GREGORY ROBINSON/U OF GEORGIA
Press International All-American and Gulf South Conference Defensive Player of the Year honors during his senior year in 1979. When not on the gridiron, he was using his scientific acumen to perform intricate chemistry in the lab. Today, Robinson, who is 54, is praised for his tenacious intellectual approach to synthetic inorganic chemistry. He is being recognized with the Cotton Award for taking advantage of the stabilizing effects of N-heterocyclic carbene ligands, typically associated with transition-metal catalysts, to trap highly reactive main-group-element fragments. “Robinson is an unusually imaginative and strikingly creative synthetic inorganic chemist,” says Georgia colleague R. Bruce King. “A hallmark of all of Greg Robinson’s papers is the elegant simplicity of his synthetic approach,” adds Philip P. Power of the University of California, Davis. The Robinson group’s milestones include the synthesis of the first stable neutral diborene, L:(H)B=B(H):L, where L is an N-heterocyclic carbene. Robinson built on that discovery to prepare the first carbene-stabilized disilene, L:Si=Si:L. This compound, effectively a soluble allotrope of elemental silicon that acts like a transition Robinson metal, has accumulated accolades from leading inorganic chemists the world over. This “impressive finding opens up new, unprecedented possibilities in organometallic chemistry,” notes Akira Sekiguchi of the University of Tsukuba, in Japan. “What baffles me is that this complex is a truly stable, ‘bottleable’ species, not just a molecule which is observed in a low-temperature matrix,” comments Gernot Frenking of Philipps University, in Marburg, Germany. “It represents a landmark in low-coordinate silicon chemistry,” says Guy Bertrand of UC San Diego. Robinson’s other notable chemical exploits include carbene-stabilized aromatic gallium ring and cluster compounds—an COURTESY OF BRUCE MARYANOFF
molecules into preclinical trials, with 13 of those advancing into human studies. That research contributed to his 275 scientific publications and 99 U.S. patents. “The results of Bruce’s efforts are always outstanding and inspiring,” says William J. Greenlee, principal at MedChem Discovery Consulting and the former head of medicinal chemistry at Merck. “He has demonstrated an exceptional ability to direct the research of his group toward successful drug candidates.” As Maryanoff approached retirement from J&J, he joined Scripps Research Institute in California as a Maryanoff visiting investigator, where he collaborates with M. Reza Ghadiri on research involving self-assembling molecular systems, protein-lipid interactions, and modulators of epigenetic pathways. After his retirement in 2010, he also took on roles at the Pennsylvania Drug Discovery Institute and at the Institute for Hepatitis & Virus Research. In addition to expanding the panoply of potential treatments for serious disorders, Maryanoff has been a tireless contributor to the wider chemistry community. He currently serves as an associate editor for ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters and has sat on the editorial boards of more than a dozen journals. Maryanoff will present the award address before the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry.—LISA JARVIS
GEORGE C. PIMENTEL AWARD IN CHEMICAL EDUCATION Sponsored by Cengage Learning and friends and colleagues of George and Jeanne Pimentel During his long career, Conrad L. Stanitski has had a significant impact on the way chemistry is taught.
ACS AWARD IN ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY Sponsored by Battelle Memorial Institute Isiah M. Warner has made significant
contributions in three areas of analytical chemistry: molecular spectroscopy, separation, and novel nanomaterials. Warner, 66, Philip W. West Professor of Chemistry at Louisiana State University (LSU), is among the leading experts in WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
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analytical fluorescence spectroscopy and has employed multidimensional fluorescence techniques to unravel complex systems. For example, he demonstrated that fluorescence-detected circular dichroism could be used to selectively monitor chiral molecules. Warner and his group have also made significant contributions to studies of organized molecules, such as micelles, in spectroscopy and separations. His group demonstrated the first noncovalently linked trans-stilbene excimer in fluid solution using a system incorporating molecules of cyclodextrin, stilbene, and cyclohexane. More recently, Warner has developed novel nanomaterials from a group of materials with uniform properties and compositions based on organic salts, which are primarily frozen ionic liquids with melting points of up to 250 °C. The work marks a simple approach to the production of nanomaterials for analytical use. Warner’s seminal contributions to analytical chemistry began early in his life. As a graduate student at the University of Washington (UW), in Seattle, he initiated development of rapidscanning excitation-emission matrix fluorescence techniques, notes one of his colleagues. Warner is “a great scientist, teacher, mentor, and administrative leader,” the colleague adds. In addition, Warner’s “deeply intellectual work has provided the mechanistic insight for the development of better chiral selectors for separations and sensors,” according to another colleague. In her estimation, one of Warner’s greatest achievements is “his creative use of fluorescence anisotropy for unraveling chiral interactions that give rise to chemical separations.” Warner, who is also a Boyd Professor of the LSU system, vice chancellor for strategic initiatives, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor at LSU, received a B.S. in chemistry from Southern University & A&M College in Baton Rouge, La., in 1968. He worked for five years at Battelle Memorial Institute before earning a Ph.D. in chemistry from UW in 1977. Warner’s first academic position was at Texas A&M University, where he received tenure. He then served on the chemistry JIM ZIETZ/LSU U RELATIONS
ganic chemistry at the University of Connecticut in 1971 and then joined Georgia State University as an assistant professor of chemistry. Stanitski was a chemistry professor at Randolph-Macon College from 1976 until 1985. He then became a lecturer in chemistry at Franklin & Marshall, while serving as an American Council on Education fellow in academic administration. In 1988, he moved to Mount Union College, where he was professor of chemistry, vice president for academic affairs, and dean of the college. In 1992, he was appointed professor of chemistry and department chair at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA). He retired from UCA as a distinguished professor emeritus in 2005 and became a visiting scholar at Franklin & Marshall. A recipient of many awards, including the Catalyst Award from the Chemical Manufacturers Association (now the American Chemistry Council), Stanitski says he is “excited and humbled” by receiving this year’s Pimentel honor from ACS. “George Pimentel, through his work in the 1960s on the Chemical Education Materials Study, was Warner an early professional role model for me,” he says. As a result, “the award has an added dimension and a very special meaning to me.” Stanitski, who is 73, will present the award address before the ACS Division of Chemical Education.—SUSAN AINSWORTH TIM BRIXIUS/FRANKLIN & MARSHALL
“He has made substantial contributions to all the areas of chemical education identified in the criteria for the Pimentel Award: teaching, organization and administration, influential writing, instructional methodology, standards of instruction, educational research, and public enlightenment,” according to A. Truman Schwartz, DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College in St. Paul, who received the award in 2007. Stanitski, a visiting scholar at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., has applied his broad teach- Stanitski ing experience to national chemistry curriculum reform projects for more than five decades. Demonstrating a commitment to high standards of instruction, Stanitski served as chair of a National Research Council committee to evaluate the Advanced Placement Program in chemistry in 2005. “Conrad often says that educators should strive to ‘uncover course material rather than simply cover it,’ and this message is clear in the report generated by the committee,” notes Jerry A. Bell, professor emeritus at Simmons College in Boston and the 2000 Pimentel Award recipient. Partly because of Stanitski’s influence, the College Board has worked to revise its Advanced Placement exam so that it clearly assesses students’ conceptual understanding of the material, according to Henry W. Heikkinen, professor emeritus at the University of Northern Colorado, who received the Pimentel Award in 2009. Stanitski served as chair of the ACS Division of Chemical Education in 2001 and has contributed administrative skills to groups including Project Kaleidoscope, the National Science Foundation, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and numerous ACS committees, Schwartz says. An influential writer, Stanitski was a coauthor or lead editor of numerous textbooks, including ACS’s “Chemistry in the Community” and “Chemistry in Context.” Stanitski earned a B.S. in science education at Bloomsburg State College in 1960 before teaching high school for four years. After receiving an M.A. in chemistry education at the University of Northern Iowa in 1964, he became an instructor at Edinboro State College. He earned a Ph.D. in inor-
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faculty of Emory University beginning in 1982, becoming a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor. He joined LSU in 1992 and served as department chair from 1994 to 1997. He has overseen more than 50 doctoral dissertations and seven master’s theses, as well as mentored hundreds of undergraduates, encouraging them to pursue degrees in the sciences. He has published more than 300 refereed manuscripts and has served on a number of National Academies committees, including as chair of the National Research Council Board on Assessment of the Chemical Science & Technology Laboratory in 1995. He has received awards including the ACS Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences in 2003 and the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Award in Spectrochemical Analysis in 2008. An ACS member, Warner was inducted into the inaugural class of ACS Fellows and chaired the society’s Division of Analytical Chemistry in 2009. He is also a member of the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists & Chemical Engineers. Warner will present the award address before the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry.—MARC REISCH
TODD PAGANO NAMED 2012 PROFESSOR OF THE YEAR Todd Pagano was among four educators
who were honored with the 2012 U.S. Professors of the Year award by the Council for Advancement & Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is an associate professor in the department of science and mathematics and director of the Laboratory Science Technology program at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology. The U.S. Professors of the Year program is the only national initiative that focuses solely on excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring. Pagano joined NTID in 2002. He taught himself sign language and helped build the institute’s Laboratory Science Technology
program, a two-year degree program that trains students who are deaf or hard of hearing to become laboratory technicians. He is the recipient of the 2012 ACS Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences. The other recipients of the 2012 U.S. Professors of the Year award are Autar Kaw, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of South Florida; Christy Price, professor of psychology at Dalton State College in Georgia; and Lois Roma-Deeley, professor of creative writing at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix.
STANLEY ISRAEL AWARD TO ANNEMARIE ROSS Annemarie Ross, an assistant professor
at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, has been awarded the 2012 Stanley C. Israel Regional Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences by the ACS Committee on Minority Affairs. The award includes a $1,000 cash prize. Ross, who is deaf, is a champion of diversifying the chemical sciences. She has served as a role model for hundreds of students with disabilities whom she has helped pursue successful careers in chemistry. She is a member of several ACS committees, including the Committee on Chemists with Disabilities, and is often looked to for her expertise in the area of educating students with disabilities.
ACS MEMBERS NAMED APS FELLOWS Twenty-five ACS members have been named 2012 Fellows of the American Physical Society. The fellowships are awarded on the basis of recommendations by the candidates’ professional peers. The ACS members in this group are Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University; Rufina Alamo of Florida State University; Alan Aspuru-Guzik of Harvard University; Robert Carpick of the University of Pennsylvania; Nikolay Dokholyan of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Claudia Felser of Johannes Gutenberg University, WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
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Mainz, in Germany; Donald G. Fleming of TRIUMF in Canada; Amalie Frischknecht of Sandia National Laboratories; Venkatraghaven Ganesan of the University of Texas, Austin; Rachel Goldman of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Mark C. Hersam of Northwestern University; Wayne P. Hess of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Christopher Li of Drexel University; Paul Mantica of Michigan State University; Benjamin McCall of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Heinz Pitsch of Stanford University; M. Samy El-Shall of Virginia Commonwealth University; Susan B. Sinnott of the University of Florida; Christopher M. Sorensen of Kansas State University; John F. Stanton of the University of Texas, Austin; Hongfei Wang of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; James Watkins of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Mark C. Williams of Northeastern University; Robert A. Wolkow of the University of Alberta; and Xiaowei Zhuang of Harvard University.
PRF GRANTEES ANNOUNCED The ACS Petroleum Research Fund has announced the recipients of its 2012 grants. The ACS Board of Directors approved 178 research grants totaling $16.2 million for advanced scientific education and fundamental research related to petroleum and other fossil fuels. The list of grantees is available at acsprf. org by clicking on “About ACS PRF.” Additional information on grant programs and upcoming submission dates is also available on the website.
SOUTHERN CHEMIST AWARD TO RADHAKRISHNA JAYANTY Radhakrishna Murty Jayanty, senior fel-
low in the environmental and industrial sciences division of RTI International, is the 2012 winner of the Southern Chemist Award, sponsored by the ACS Memphis Section. The award acknowledges outstanding achievement in chemistry and contributions to the field that
