Fry Lecture Presents Noted Organic Chemist

Noted organic chemist J. Fraser Stoddart will present “Chemistry and Molecular Nanotechnology for Tomorrow’s World,” Monday, November 19, 2007 as part of the Arthur Fry Lecture Series. Stoddart is the Fred Kavli Chair of NanoSystems Sciences and director of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. The lecture will take place at 3:30 p.m. in CHEM 132 with a reception at 3 p.m. in CHEM 105. Note: the location of this lecture has changed from CHEM 144 to CHEM 132.

Stoddart is one of the few chemists of the past quarter of a century to have created a new field of organic chemistry – namely, one in which the mechanical bond is a pre-eminent feature of molecular compounds. He has pioneered the development of the use of molecular recognition and self-assembly processes in template-directed protocols for the syntheses of two-state mechanically interlocked compounds (bistable catenanes and rotaxanes) that have been employed as molecular switches and as motor-molecules in the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices and NanoElectroMechanical Systems (NEMS).

He received B.Sc. (1964), Ph.D. (1966) D.Sc. (1980) degrees from Edinburgh University and did postdoctoral work at Sheffield University in England and Queen’s University in Canada. His work has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Carbohydrate Chemistry Award of The Chemical Society (1978), the International Izatt-Christensen Award in Macrocyclic Chemistry (1993), the American Chemical Society’s Cope Scholar Award (1999), the Nagoya Gold Medal in Organic Chemistry (2004), the King Faisal International Prize in Science (2007), the Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (2007), and the American Chemical Society’s Cope Award (2008).

In 2001, he was among 20 research scientists to be invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to participate in the Nobel Jubilee Symposium on “Frontiers of Molecular Sciences” in Stockholm.  

In 2007, he was appointed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as a Knight Bachelor in her 2007 New Year’s Honours List for his services to chemistry and molecular nanotechnology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1994), the German Academy (Leopoldina) of Natural Sciences (1999), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005), and the Science Division of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006). Currently, he is the editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry Series of Monographs on Supramolecular Chemistry and serves on the international advisory boards of numerous journals, including Angewandte Chemie and the Journal of Organic Chemistry.

He has been awarded named lectureships at many universities and has given nearly 700 invited lectures worldwide.The impact of his work is evident from his citation statistics. Four of his more than 790 publications have been cited over 500 times, 11 over 300, 54 over 100, and 155 over 50. He has an h-index of 78. For the period from January 1997 to February 28, 2007, he was ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information as the third most cited chemist with a total of 12,840 citations from 293 papers at a frequency of 43.8 citations per paper. His creativity and imagination has inspired more than 280 students, who have passed through his laboratories during his career.