Awards

• Two Receive Iota Sigma Pi Awards
• Madeleine Jacobs Honored For Executive Excellence
• Gordon Amidon To Receive Volwiler Award
• Degussa Honors Benjamin List For Achievements In Chiral Chemistry
• Chemical Computing Excellence Awards
• Joel Miller Is 2003 Utah Awardee
• HIST Citations For Chemical Breakthroughs
• North Jersey Honors Chemistry Educator

Two Receive Iota Sigma Pi Awards

Iota sigma Pi, the national honor society for women in chemistry, has selected two chemists to receive annual awards.

Carolyn R. Bertozzi, professor of chemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is the 2004 recipient of the Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award. This annual award is given to a woman under age 40 for research achievement in chemistry or biochemistry.

Bertozzi attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and earned an A.B. in chemistry in 1988. She moved to UC Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry, which she received in 1993, working with Mark Bednarski on the synthesis and biological activity of C-glycosides.

Bertozzi joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1996. Her research focuses on profiling changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer, inflammation, and bacterial infection and exploiting this information to develop diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. Bertozzi is a member of several scientific advisory boards of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and is a cofounder of Thios Pharmaceuticals.

Rose Ann Clark, associate professor of chemistry at Saint Francis University, Loretto, Pa., will receive the 2004 Iota Sigma Pi Centennial Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award is given for excellence in teaching chemistry, biochemistry, or a chemistry-related field at an undergraduate institution that does not offer a graduate program in that field.

Clark received a B.S. in chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from North Carolina State University under the direction of Edmond F. Bowden. After spending two years as a postdoc at Pennsylvania State University with Andrew G. Ewing, she joined the chemistry department at Saint Francis to focus on undergraduate education and research.

She has been instrumental in the transformation of the chemistry department, which has undergone complete curriculum revisions with addition of concentrations in forensic chemistry and biochemistry and a neuroscience minor. Not only is the curriculum changing, but the method of teaching has also changed. Clark adopted new active-learning textbooks to further encourage active learning in general chemistry classes and helped to redesign the ways labs are taught by incorporating cooperative learning at all levels.

Her success at making research an effective teaching tool for undergraduates is reflected in the progress of students she has mentored. Undergraduates conducting research with Clark have presented a large number of papers at conferences locally, regionally, and nationally.

Madeleine Jacobs Honored For Executive Excellence

On June 17, the Commercial Development & Marketing Association and the Chemical Heritage Foundation will present their 2004 Award for Executive Excellence to Madeleine Jacobs, ACS executive director and CEO. The award is given annually to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution in the field of commercial development and marketing in the chemical and allied industries. With extensive experience at several major scientific organizations, Jacobs consistently demonstrated strategic thinking, innovation, and effective communication on issues critical to the chemical community during her previous position as editor-in-chief of Chemical & Engineering News, and she has made an important contribution by serving as an ambassador for the chemical sciences, CDMA says.

Gordon Amidon To Receive Volwiler Award

The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Board of Directors has selected Gordon L. Amidon, Charles R. Walgreen Jr. Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy, as the recipient of the 2004 AACP Volwiler Research Achievement Award. Amidon was selected to receive the association's premier research award, given since 1977 to recognize outstanding research conducted by a pharmaceutical scientist and educator, based on his research productivity and exceptional sustained service to the pharmaceutical sciences as a whole.

Sponsored by Abbott Laboratories in memory of its former president and research director, Ernest H. Volwiler, the award consists of a $12,500 stipend, a specially struck gold medal, and an inscribed plaque. Amidon is the 28th recipient of the award and will be honored on July 11 at AACP's annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Amidon has distinguished himself in the areas of solubility-permeability, intestinal absorption mechanisms, biopharmaceutics, and molecular drug targeting with prodrugs. Of particular note is his work on oral drug absorption that established the fundamental basis for a set of regulatory standards, widely recognized as the Biopharmaceutics Classification System. BCS is an innovative approach to regulating the bioequivalence of pharmaceutical dosage forms, and its influence is enormous because it affects the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry.

Amidon is the editor of the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics, published by ACS.

Degussa Honors Benjamin List For Achievements In Chiral Chemistry

Degussa Exclusive Synthesis & Catalysts will present the first Degussa Award for Chirality in Chemistry to Benjamin List of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. The Degussa Award for Chirality in Chemistry is given for innovative research in amino acids performed by a chemist under 40. The award of about $6,000 (5,000 euros) will be presented to List at the 2004 Chiral Europe conference being held in Mainz, Germany, this week, where he will also deliver the prize lecture.

"Degussa places a strong emphasis on innovation and recognizes the achievements of young researchers in academia," says Peter Nagler, president of Degussa Exclusive Synthesis & Catalysts. "Once we developed the concept for this award, we asked an independent, international jury of distinguished organic chemists to nominate a candidate. List stood out for his pioneering work in amino catalysis."

List studied at the Free University, Berlin, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt. He then moved to Scripps Research Institute, where he became assistant professor in 1999. In 2003, he returned to Germany as an associate professor at Max Planck Institute.

List is a pioneer in amino-catalyzed asymmetric synthesis, using natural amino acids such as proline as simple enzyme mimics. The advantages of this method over transition-metal-catalyzed asymmetric reactions are that no precious metals or complex ligands are required and the reaction can be run to recover the amino acid catalyst for reuse.

Chemical Computing Excellence Awards

The Chemical Computing Group (CCG) and the ACS Division of Computers in Chemistry (COMP) presented the latest winners of the CCG Excellence Awards at the 227th ACS national meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

The CCG Excellence Awards are intended to encourage graduate student participation and interaction among computational chemists in COMP activities at ACS national meetings. Winners are selected according to the high quality and relevance of their research, as well as the caliber of supporting materials. The winners received a one-year software license for the most recent version of MOE, the Molecular Operating Environment, in addition to reimbursement for travel expenses to Anaheim.

Winners and their projects are the following:

Andreas Bender--"Similarity Searching Using Atom Environments, Information-Gain-Based Feature Selection, and the Naïve Bayesian Classifier," University of Cambridge.

Xiaolin Cheng--"Molecular Dynamics Simulations of 8-Oxoguanine: A Mismatch DNA," State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Wei (David) Deng--"Predicting Protein-Ligand Binding Affinities Using Transferable Atom-Equivalent Techniques and Machine-Learning Methods," Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Asif Ladiwala--"Prediction of Protein Affinity in Hydrophobic Interaction Chromatography Using Quantitative Structure-Retention Relationship Models," Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Anne E. Loccisano--"Development of New CHARMM Force-Field Parameters for Novel DNA Binding Agents," Duquesne University.

Asim Okur--"Multiple Pathways in ß-Hairpin Folding and Unfolding Simulations," State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Alexander Perryman--"HIV-1 Protease Molecular Dynamics of a Wild-Type and of the V82F/I84V Mutant: Possible Contributions to Drug Resistance and a Potential New Target Site for Drugs," Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of California, San Diego.

Sarah A. Mueller Stein--"Influence of Steric Congestion on the Dynamics and Geometry of DNA," Duquesne University.

Jessica Swanson--"Revisiting Free Energy Calculations: One Step Closer to Rigorous Scoring Functions and One Step beyond MM/PBSA," University of California, Berkeley.

Ivan Tubert-Brohman--"Improved Semiempirical Methods: Parameterization of PDDG/PM3 for Sulfur," Yale University.

Joel Miller Is 2003 Utah Awardee

On June 2, Joel S. Miller, chemistry professor at the University of Utah, received the Utah Award from the ACS Central Utah and Salt Lake Sections. The annual award is for outstanding achievement in chemistry in Utah. Miller's research group seeks to develop, understand, and exploit materials exhibiting the technologically important property of bulk ferromagnetism as well as to understand unusual carbon-carbon bonding. His group designed and synthesized the first organic magnet as well as the first organic magnet that works above room temperature.

HIST Citations For Chemical Breakthroughs

The ACS Division of History of Chemistry (HIST) is initiating a new award program: HIST Citations for Chemical Breakthroughs. Beginning in 2005, these citations will recognize breakthrough publications and patents worldwide in the field of chemistry. Plaques, to be placed in the hallways outside the office or laboratory where the breakthroughs were achieved, will be presented annually to the departments and institutions at which these breakthroughs occurred.

"We believe that identifying and celebrating chemical successes are important to the continued prosperity of chemistry worldwide. We envision that our colleagues and friends, seeing these plaques, will feel pride and inspiration in being a contributor to the sciences," says Jeffrey Seeman, HIST chair-elect. He says the selection process will involve open solicitation of nominations from the chemical community. An awards committee composed of eminent scientists and historians of science will provide careful screening of the nominees and selection of each year's awardees. For additional information, contact Seeman at HIST_CCB@yahoo.com.

North Jersey Honors Chemistry Educator

Richard Mendelsohn, a professor of biophysical chemistry at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, has won the 2004 Sr. Marian Jose Smith Excellence in Chemical Education Award from ACS's North Jersey Section.

The prize, awarded biennially since 1993 and funded by Hoffmann-La Roche, recognizes an educator in the North Jersey Section area who has inspired students to pursue and succeed in careers in chemistry. Mendelsohn received the prize on the recommendation of several of his former students, who credited his enthusiasm and interest in the lab with inspiring them to enter the chemistry world.

Mendelsohn received his bachelor's degree from McGill University and a Ph.D. in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of Rutgers in 1976.