2004 ACS National Award Winners

Following is the third set of vignettes of recipients of awards administered by the American Chemical Society for 2004. C&EN will publish the vignettes of the remaining recipients in successive January and February issues. An article on Elias J. Corey, 2004 Priestley Medalist, is scheduled to appear in the March 29 issue of C&EN along with his award address.

Most of the award recipients will be honored at an awards ceremony, which will be held on Tuesday, March 30, in conjunction with the 227th ACS national meeting in Anaheim, Calif. However, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar awardees will be honored at the 228th ACS national meeting in Philadelphia, Aug. 22-26.

Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical & Experimental Chemistry of Liquids

Sponsored by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering Co. and ExxonMobil Chemical Co.

C. Austin Angell, regents professor of chemistry at Arizona State University, is being honored for his pioneering contributions to the understanding of supercooled water, the glassy state, glassy electrolytes, and polymer-containing electrolytes. A colleague describes him as "a truly major force in defining the foremost issues, asking many of the key questions, and providing insightful answers in the vast field of liquids and glasses."

In 1976, Angell published a now-classic paper in which he showed that the compressibility of water increases anomalously upon supercooling. This paper launched a new field of research, which continues to date, aimed at understanding the origin of supercooled water's anomalous properties.

As one of the leading authorities on the glassy state, Angell's most important contribution is the development of the fragility concept. He showed that the temperature dependence of the characteristic relaxation times of viscous liquids fall into two broad categories: strong liquids exhibiting Arrhenius behavior and fragile liquids exhibiting temperature-dependent activation energies that increase upon cooling.

Angell is also credited with the development of the decoupling index concept for characterizing the freedom of conducting species to move independently of the supporting medium (liquid, polymer, or glass) and with the polymer-in-salt concept for high decoupling index nonglassy Li-battery electrolytes. His group developed the widest electrochemical window solvent on record--ethylmethylsulfone, 5.9 V--and the most completely dissociating salt on record--LiBOB--according to high-temperature dilute solution studies. With LiBOB, high-power lithium batteries for automobile power trains are a near-future probability, according to Argonne National Laboratory scientists.

Angell, 70, received a B.Sc. in 1954 and an M.Sc. in 1956 from Melbourne University, in Australia, and a Ph.D. from Imperial College of Science, University of London, in 1961. He was a lecturer at Melbourne University for two years and a research associate at Argonne National Laboratory for two years. At Purdue University, he was first an assistant professor, then associate professor, then full professor of chemistry from 1966 to 1989. In 1989, he became a professor of chemistry at Arizona State University, and in 1999, he was made regents professor there.

Previously, Angell received the Neville Mott Award of the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids, the G. W. Morey Award of the American Ceramic Society, two faculty research awards from Purdue, and two NSF Special Creativity Awards. In 1998, a symposium was held in Pisa, Italy, in recognition of his collected works. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals and has chaired three Gordon Conferences. He has authored more than 425 papers, and he wrote one book and is the editor of two others.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Physical Chemistry.--JANET DODD

Gabor A. Somorjai Award for Creative Researchin Catalysis

Sponsored by the Gabor A. & Judith K. <br > Somorjai Endowment Fund

Bruce C. Gates can't quite put his finger on the origin of his interest in science. "I certainly enjoyed science classes in high school, but by that time, I had already known for a while that I liked science," he recalls. Growing up in a family with a father who was a petroleum engineer and with family friends who were scientists and engineers must have had some effect on Gates's early interests. But nobody pushed the young Gates toward science--at least not directly. "I guess their influences just sort of seeped in," he says.

With college came Gates's introduction to catalysis and a lasting academic influence. As a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, Gates took a kinetics course with chemical engineering professor Theodore Vermeulen and soon began doing research with him on kinetics of catalytic reactions. Gates recalls being struck by Vermeulen's ability "to make chemistry and chemical engineering one whole. He blended the topics seamlessly and interrelated and overlapped them in the way he thought and taught," Gates notes. "I gravitated toward that approach and have been influenced by it ever since."

Catalysis experts in numerous countries recognize Gates for his tireless work in integrating homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis into the field of molecular surface catalysis. He is also widely recognized for lasting contributions in hydroprocessing and acid-base catalysis. Gates's research group led the way in making systematic measurements of reaction networks and kinetics of hydroprocessing reactions under near-industrial conditions. For example, the group conducted pioneering studies of hydrodesulfurization, hydrocracking, and aromatic hydrogenation reactions.

One area with which Gates's name is synonymous is supported metal cluster catalysis. Gates's group has published on the topic broadly. But as Texas A&M University professor emeritus Jack H. Lunsford puts it, a "quintessential example" of the group's work in cluster catalysis is described in a 2002 paper in Nature. In that study, Gates's group combined X-ray absorption spectroscopy, IR spectroscopy, and catalytic measurements of hydrogenation of ethene and propene to demonstrate that the hydrocarbons and catalyst-support material both function as ligands that modify bonding and catalytic properties of supported Ir₄ clusters. According to Lunsford, "The methodology and results establish a protocol for bridging the gap between homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis."

In addition to the reputation built from a career's worth of laboratory work, Gates is also well known for writing authoritative textbooks, including "Chemistry of Catalytic Processes," which has been translated into several languages, and "Catalytic Chemistry."

Gates, 63, graduated from UC Berkeley in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. In 1966, he received a Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle. Following a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Munich's Institute of Physical Chemistry, Gates returned to the U.S., where he served as a research engineer at Chevron Research in Richmond, Calif., near his hometown.

In 1969, Gates began his academic career as an assistant professor in chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. He was promoted to professor in 1977, the same year he was appointed associate director of Delaware's Center for Catalytic Science & Technology. From 1981 to 1988, Gates served as the center's director. In 1992, the California native returned to the West Coast as professor of chemical engineering and materials science at UC Davis.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Petroleum Chemistry.--MITCH JACOBY

ACS Award in the Chemistry of Materials

Sponsored by E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co.

No one has done more to advance basic research at the nanoscale toward practical applications than Charles M. Lieber, Mark Hyman Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. According to numerous colleagues, in the past decade he has established himself as the world's leader in the fabrication and study of electronically functional nanostructures.

"Charles has gone farther, I believe, than anyone else in making the case for the bottom up--that is, chemical--approach to functional nanostructures," says Harvard chemistry professor George M. Whitesides. "Both the materials he is synthesizing and the strategies that he is demonstrating will have enormous impact on the future of materials science. It may also change device physics and perhaps, ultimately, electronics in a most profound way."

Lieber, 44, began his work in nanoscience with studies of the materials that, in many ways, have sparked the current nanotechnology frenzy--carbon nanotubes. His research systematically examined carbon nanotubes from the point of view of someone interested in the electronic properties of matter. His work and that of a handful of others demonstrated that carbon nanotubes are very complicated entities, with small differences in structure having major implications on properties. Despite these difficulties, Lieber has fashioned nanotubes into a number of primitive electronic devices.

More recently, Lieber has expanded his horizons to traditional semiconductor materials. For example, he has been able to grow nanowires of single crystalline silicon and compound semiconductors, which are electronically much simpler than carbon nanotubes. "In a burst of papers published in the last two years," Whitesides notes, "Charles has demonstrated a host of important, archetypical devices, all fabricated by crossing nanowires of one or another material: diodes, transistors, light-emitting diodes. His work has already laid the foundation for a decade of work in this area by the field of nanodevices physics."

Lieber's early research career focused on the use of scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopies to characterize a wide range of materials. He turned to efforts to craft nanoscale devices because of the enormous potential they offer.

"With nanoscience--it's not a technology, yet--I truly believe that one has the opportunity to change many technologies as they exist today," Lieber says. "Moreover, nanoscience will lead to new technologies we haven't even envisioned." Lieber says that nanoscience represents a fundamental change in how one builds things, a bottom-up paradigm that uses chemistry to mold inorganic materials in much the way biology has always created organic structures.

"What we are doing, in essence, is defining the syntheses and properties of new nanoscale structures--wires and other building blocks," Lieber says. "It is becoming clear to me that one can build in functional diversity by varying structure and composition with molecular precision. Likewise, we are learning how to organize this matter in making proof-of-concept devices from sensors to circuits to photonic devices."

The materials Lieber is working with, he says, are "slightly bigger than molecules; they are inorganic analogs of proteins. Proteins are functional, but not in an electronic or photonic sense. The materials we are working with are of sufficient size to have robust electronic properties. And we are able to build in desired properties with the precision that chemists are used to."

Lieber received a B.A. in chemistry in 1981 from Franklin & Marshall College and a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1985 from Stanford University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech, he joined the chemistry department at Columbia University in 1987. He moved to Harvard as a professor of chemistry in 1991.

Lieber is a fellow of the International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society. He has received numerous awards, including the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology in 2001 and the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry in 1992.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Physical Chemistry.--RUDY BAUM

ACS Award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution

Sponsored by Research Corp.

Chemistry undergraduates at the University of Texas, El Paso, are in for an adventure if they plan to do research with professor Keith H. Pannell. His reputation for outstanding accomplishments in organometallic chemistry might sound sedate, but don't let that fool you.

"Keith is a very colorful character," says T. Don Tilley, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a recognized expert in organometallics.

Pannell, 63, is a native of Great Britain. He studied at Durham University, in England, where he earned a B.Sc. in chemistry in 1962 and an M.Sc. in nuclear and radiochemistry in 1963. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in organosilicon chemistry from the University of Toronto.

After two postdoctoral positions, one at the University of Georgia, Athens, and the next at England's University of Sussex, Pannell decided to search for a professorship in the U.S. For him, finding the right university was as much a matter of location as reputation.

"Why would I want to move from England just to settle in New England?" Pannell asks. Instead, he was attracted to the distinctive culture of the Southwest and nearby Mexico. "The people are extraordinarily friendly and open," he says.

El Paso offered Pannell the cultural diversity he craved as well as a top-rate chemistry department, but it did not offer Ph.D.s. Undaunted, he took a faculty position with the university in 1971 and dove right into research projects with his undergraduate students.

Building on his own graduate studies, Pannell focused his research at El Paso on the chemistry of group 14 elements--silicon, germanium, tin, and lead--with a particular emphasis on how these elements bond with transition metals. He is recognized as a pioneer in silicon-transition-metal chemistry, having made many of the first observations of key processes in these types of interactions.

"Keith is impressive as a person who operates under unusual circumstances," Tilley says. "He is more productive than some researchers at Ph.D.-granting institutions." In fact, Pannell has published more than 180 papers over the course of his academic career, many of them with undergraduate coauthors.

The true hallmark of his success, however, is his ability to get his students excited about chemistry. "He has a good rapport with his students and a lot of respect for them, which gives them confidence," Tilley says. Although working at an undergraduate institution was not a deliberate choice, Pannell is very proud that so many of his students have gone on to do great things.

"The undergrads attracted to my group have been outstanding," he says. Many have earned their Ph.D.s and have embarked on exceptional careers. "One of my students is now a rear admiral in the Navy," he says. Another is George McClendon, professor and head of the chemistry department at Princeton University.

In addition, a significant and constantly increasing number of Pannell's researchers have been Hispanic, an underrepresented group in U.S. scientific research. Pannell, who speaks Spanish, also interacts frequently with the Mexican research community, particularly with the Universidad Autonoma de Guanajuato. "Working in the Southwest has been, and continues to be, a tremendously big adventure," he says.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Inorganic Chemistry.--VICTORIA GILMAN

ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry

Sponsored by ExxonMobil Chemical

Virgil Percec, P. Roy Vagelos Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, has contributed to the development of novel methods of polymer synthesis for both covalent and supramolecular systems ranging from liquid-crystalline polymers to dendrimers.

"The trademarks of his work include amazing creativity, great breadth, vision, thoroughness, and reliability," remarks Jean M. J. Fréchet, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. "He has opened numerous new important areas of polymer chemistry and found ways to apply his enormous skills to solve real problems of scientific and technological significance."

Percec's research has focused on a wide variety of topics, including the synthesis and chemistry of poly(arylacetylene)s, metal-catalyzed ion-radical arylations, phase-transfer catalyzed polymerizations, living radical polymerizations, and supramolecular polymer chemistry.

Born in 1946, he obtained his Ph.D. at the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, Jassy, Romania, in 1976. His career in polymer chemistry, he says, was influenced by many people, including his parents.

"My father, who was a musician and a painter, paid for me to have private lessons to learn almost any instrument, and he taught me painting," he tells C&EN. "Although I became addicted to art, I did not want to be second to my father, and therefore I decided to study architecture."

During the last few weeks at high school, he had several classes of organic chemistry that persuaded him to switch to polymer chemistry.

"My parents were not happy with my decision," he says. "However, nature was a model for art, and I therefore decided to use it as an inspiration for the construction of complex molecular, macromolecular, and supramolecular architectures."

In the late 1970s, he elaborated methods for the synthesis and structural analysis of cis-poly(phenylacetylene)s that today provide the most frequently used models for nonbiological helical macromolecules.

After defecting from his native Romania, Percec carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and the University of Akron, in Ohio. He was appointed assistant professor in the department of macromolecular science at Case Western Reserve University in 1982 and became professor there in 1986. He took up his present post at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

"His mid-1980s, work on intramolecular and intermolecular donor-acceptor interactions to control the mechanism of radical polymerization and copolymerization as well as interpolymeric self-organization was seminal to the development of the concept of self-organizing liquid crystals by donor-acceptor interactions," Fréchet remarks.

During the 1990s, Percec explored the interface between supramolecular and macromolecular chemistry. His work included the discovery of cyclic and dendritic liquid crystals and the design and synthesis of taper-shaped monomers that mimic the building blocks of viruses in their self-assembly characteristics as they spontaneously form highly ordered macromolecular structures.

He also discovered polymerization methods that employ nickel-catalyzed homo- and cross-coupling reactions of unactivated aryl sulfonates to generate carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bonds.

"This work has become a standard tool of the synthetic polymer chemists," according to Fréchet. "His methods constitute the simplest and most convenient route for the preparation of soluble regioregular poly(p-phenylenes)."

Percec's work has received international acclaim. In 1993, he was elected a foreign member of the Romanian Academy, and in 2002, he received the Polymer Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in the Netherlands. He was chair of the European Gordon Research Conference on Polymers in Paris in 1997. He is also the author of over 520 publications and 31 patents, and has presented more than 765 contributed, invited, and endowed lectures in over 35 countries.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Polymer Chemistry. --MICHAEL FREEMANTLE

James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry

Sponsored by the ACS Northeastern Section

The isoprenoid biosynthetic pathway, found in all organisms, is responsible for synthesizing the most chemically diverse set of compounds found in nature. C. Dale Poulter's work at the boundary between chemistry and biology has yielded critical insights into the mechanisms of the enzyme-catalyzed reactions nature uses to assemble isoprenoid building blocks into complex structures.

Poulter, who is the John A. Widtsoe Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah, has made a career of combining physical organic chemistry with biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetics.

Poulter is also known for his pioneering nuclear magnetic resonance studies of transfer RNA. Some 20 years ago, when he began to study the structure of tRNA by NMR, the complexity of the spectra made identifying and assigning peaks next to impossible. Poulter developed valuable techniques for substituting selected carbon and nitrogen atoms in tRNA with their NMR active isotopes. He created methods for editing the complex proton spectra to observe only those signals for the protons attached to isotopically labeled atoms. In this way, he and his coworkers were able to pick out and assign key nuclei from the sea of surrounding noise. Structural biologists now routinely use this method to determine the three-dimensional structures of proteins and nucleic acids in solution.

Poulter graduated with a B.S. in chemistry from Louisiana State University in 1964. He then received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of California, Berkeley. After a two-year postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles, Poulter joined the University of Utah, where he has been ever since. He holds appointments in the departments of biochemistry and medicinal chemistry, and was chairman of the chemistry department from 1995 to 2001.

Poulter has won numerous awards, including the ACS Division of Biological Chemistry's Repligen Award in 2002, the University of Utah Rosenblatt Prize in 1999, an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in 1998, the Governor's Medal for Science & Technology in 1995, and the ACS Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products in 1991. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served terms as associate editor for the Journal of Organic Chemistry and Organic Letters and has been editor-in-chief of JOC since 2001.

The award address will be presented <br > before the Division of Organic Chemistry.--ELIZABETH WILSON

Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products

Sponsored by Givaudan

William R. Roush's colleagues describe his work as ground-breaking research in the total synthesis of complex natural products, featuring insightful and scholarly stereochemical analysis, creative strategy, and exceptionally thorough methodology development. That work has earned him the Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products.

Roush, 52, is a professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The award recognizes Roush's work on the analysis, structure determination, and synthesis of natural products.

Roush began his investigations in natural products with studies focused on the intramolecular Diels-Alder reaction, which had been recognized but not thoroughly evaluated prior to his studies. Roush's lab built upon that research to include the total synthesis of dendrobine, which, according to one colleague, "ranks among the most ambitious and elegant applications of intramolecular Diels-Alder strategy."

Other work on the synthesis of chlorothricolide featured a tandem sequence of inter- and intramolecular Diels-Alder reactions to achieve stereocontrol, starting from a hexaene to give a product with three new rings and six new stereocenters in one operation.

Roush also has tackled the interface of synthesis and stereochemistry. A case in point: his group's highly optimized tartrate allylboronate reagents, enabling exceptional enantioselectivity for the synthesis of propionate-acetate aldol sequences. And his article on the aldol reaction of lithium and boron enolates with chiral aldehydes "is required reading for graduate students in natural products synthesis for its detailed analysis of gauche pentane interactions in aldol stereocontrol," one colleague says.

The third major area of focus for his group is glycosidation chemistry. For example, he has developed a methodology to optimize the selectivity of both the 2-deoxy-2-a and 2-deoxy-b series of glycosides, using 2-deoxy-2-iodoglucopyranosyl acetates or trichloroacetimidates.

While conducting his research, however, Roush has been able to mentor many young undergraduate and graduate students--a quality he is famous for, says one colleague. He has trained two generations of natural products chemists, imparting his own attention to scholarship, says one former student.

A native Californian, Roush received his B.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Ph.D., followed by postdoctoral work, at Harvard. He was a member of the department of chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1978 to 1987, first as assistant professor and then as associate professor.

In 1987, he moved to Indiana University as associate professor, later becoming full professor of chemistry and then distinguished professor of chemistry. He took up his post as Warner Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1997, and became chair of the department of chemistry--his current post--in 2002.

A consultant or advisory board member to a variety of companies interested in natural products, he has also served as an ad hoc member of several study sections of the National Institutes of Health, chairing at least one study section. He chaired the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry in 1995, and has been on the editorial board of several journals devoted to organic synthesis, including serving as associate editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

He has received a variety of other honors and awards, including an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from ACS. He has held a number of named lectureships, both in the U.S. and internationally.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Organic Chemistry.--PATRICIA SHORT

ACS Award in Industrial Chemistry

Sponsored by the ACS Division of Business Development & Management

Joseph C. Salamone, vice president of research at Bausch & Lomb in Rochester, N.Y., has conducted "pioneering research in the development of biomaterial products for ophthalmology and skin care treatment," according to Eli M. Pearce, university research professor at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, N.Y. Several of Salamone's inventions have been commercialized. Indeed, he has touched many lives with his work in contact lenses and in wound care. Altogether, the products he's had a hand in developing have generated over $1 billion in sales.

Salamone, 64, earned a B.S. in chemistry at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y., in 1961. In 1967, he was awarded a doctorate in chemistry by Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. After a stint as research associate and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he began his academic career as an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in 1970. By 1976, Salamone was a full professor, and he served as dean of the College of Pure & Applied Science from 1981 to 1984. He currently holds the rank of emeritus professor of chemistry.

At the same time as he pursued his academic career, Salamone was active in business. In 1972, he and two partners founded Polymer Technology Corp. (PTC) to develop rigid gas-permeable contact lenses, lens solutions, and cleaners. The firm was sold to Bausch & Lomb in 1983. Salamone helped launch Optimers Inc. in 1985 to develop soft contact lens materials. And, in the following year, he cofounded Rochal Industries to develop wound dressing materials. Salamone joined Bausch & Lomb in 1997.

At PTC, Salamone and one of his former graduate students, Edward J. Ellis, "utilized the concept of enhanced free volume with hindered methacryloyloxysiloxanyl monomers to increase markedly oxygen permeability," Pearce says. "The concept of enhancing oxygen permeability by increasing free volume was later used in soft lens manufacture, and this has led to a new generation of silicone hydrogel contact lens products."

Salamone and Ellis went on to develop the concept for a novel type of wetting solution for contact lenses. Conventional wetting agents of the time only formed weak hydrogen bonds with lenses and hence didn't work for long, according to Pearce. Salamone and Ellis instead drew on the stronger interactions between the ionically charged lens surface and a water-soluble, oppositely charged polyion as wetting agent. The two substances formed a monomolecular polyelectrolyte hydrogel complex on the lens surface that greatly increased comfort, Pearce notes.

"To this day, all the products of PTC are the world's leaders in their fields," Salamone says. "I derive great satisfaction in knowing that my inventions have benefited many individuals."

At Rochal Industries, Salamone, along with his former wife, Ann B. Salamone, and his former postdoc Alfred P. Olson, created an oxygen-permeable siloxanyl film for covering wounds. Unlike conventional products, the film was made without organic solvents, markedly reducing burning, stinging, and itching, Pearce notes. In addition, wounds to which it is applied heal rapidly.

Salamone has also been active in the world of publishing, developing the "Polymeric Materials Encyclopedia" for CRC Press in 1996.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Business Development & Management.--SOPHIE ROVNER

ACS Award for Team Innovation

Sponsored by ACS Corporation Associates

Van Slyke

Two Eastman Kodak researchers are being honored for their joint work in inventing a new flat-panel display technology and in developing it for commercialization. Research fellow Ching W. Tang and research associate Steven A. Van Slyke, who have worked together for 24 years in Rochester, N.Y., "literally created a technology," according to Richard Eisenberg, Tracy H. Harris Professor of Chemistry at the University of Rochester. Their work, he adds, "served as the seminal research for the development of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, and it is widely cited by all workers in the field." In fact, Tang and Van Slyke's first OLED paper [Appl. Phys. Lett., 51, 913 (1987)] has garnered more than 2,500 references.

Eastman Kodak Research Associate Henry J. Gysling notes that, "unlike traditional liquid-crystal displays, OLEDs are self-luminous and do not require backlighting. This eliminates the need for bulky and environmentally undesirable mercury lamps and provides a thinner display that is more compact." OLED technology is already used in car audio components, digital cameras, and cell phones, and Gysling expects it to show up soon in DVD players and PDAs.

The breakthrough that led to the creation of OLEDs was Tang and Van Slyke's realization that "organic materials can efficiently convert electricity into light that can be quickly switched on and off," Gysling says. "The development of the OLED display technology resulted from their application of this phenomenon, their invention of a bilayer device structure, and their use of novel organic and metal-organic materials."

On the company website, Kodak explains that "the basic OLED cell structure consists of a stack of thin organic layers sandwiched between a transparent anode and a metallic cathode. The organic layers comprise a hole-injection layer, a hole-transport layer, an emissive layer, and an electron-transport layer. When an appropriate voltage (typically a few volts) is applied to the cell, the injected positive and negative charges recombine in the emissive layer to produce light."

Tang and Van Slyke used aromatic amines such as 4,4'-bis[N-a-naphthyl-N-phenylamino]biphenyl for the hole-transport layer and the metal-organic compound known as Alq, which is tris(8-hydroxyquinolinato)aluminum(III), for the electron-transport layer. They selected highly fluorescent dyes such as coumarins as emitting layer dopants.

Born in 1947 in Hong Kong, Tang grew up in a rural village that had no electric power. As a result, he says, he is pleased that his work with OLEDs and solar cells have made "contributions in research that has something to do with conversion between light and electricity."

Tang earned a B.S. in chemistry at the University of British Columbia in 1970 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1975 at Cornell University. He then joined Kodak, where he has remained ever since, working on organic optoelectronic materials and applications in solar cells, electrophotography, and display technology. Gysling notes that "his work has been characterized by exceptional creativity and insight, along with an ability to apply his innovations to the development of useful devices."

Tang is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Society for Information Display.

Van Slyke, who was born in 1956 in Denver, earned a B.S. in chemistry at Ithaca College, in New York, in 1978 and an M.S. in materials science at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1988. He began his career at Kodak, where he has concentrated on OLEDs, in 1979.

In his career, he is proud of "sticking with the new OLED technology when others--apart from Dr. Tang--did not see the promise."

Between them, Tang and Van Slyke have been awarded more than 60 patents and published more than 60 papers.

What advice can this successful pair pass along about working in a team? "Respect and trust your team members," Tang suggests. "Make sure each individual's expertise is relevant and complementary."

Van Slyke recommends "taking the time to understand and explore viewpoints of other team members."

The award address will be presented before the Division of Physical Chemistry.--SOPHIE ROVNER

ACS Award in Colloid Chemistry

Sponsored by Procter & Gamble

Joseph A. Zasadzinski, 45, says he's way too chicken to be an astronaut, "so the only way I can be first to see something is with my microscopes." Zasadzinski, professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is being recognized for both his novel and insightful use of microscopy to view complex fluids and his development of new materials.

"I am very visually oriented," Zasadzinski says. "I want to see what I am doing at all times." His laboratory is one of the few in the world to use all major microscopy techniques, including optical, electron, and scanning probe microscopes. Zasadzinski will even put together his own microscope or modify an existing one in order to see what he is studying. He has introduced microscopy, according to engineering professor Eric W. Kaler of the University of Delaware, "to systems where direct visualization has never been attempted."

Zasadzinski's group has been the first to describe many properties of biological membranes and organic thin films, including ripple states of lamellae, layered states of "disklike micelles" in aqueous solution, and exotic liquid-crystal phases. His group sparked a renewed interest in using Langmuir-Blodgett films for nanotechnology by studying their multilayered ordering with atomic force microscopy.

Yet Zasadzinski doesn't just observe; he also creates. Some of his better known materials are artificial lung surfactant systems and compartmentalized vesicles, or "vesosomes" for drug delivery.

With optical and atomic force microscopies, Zasadzinski determined the mechanism of how natural lung surfactants produce low surface tension monolayers. He then created a synthetic surfactant for disease therapy made of simple peptides.

A vesosome is a group of small phospholipid bilayer vesicles within one larger bilayer capsule. Zasadzinski says the inspiration for vesosomes came from his first real job as a box boy in a supermarket. "Double bagging groceries was the way to get milk and eggs home safely. There really isn't much of an intellectual leap to the vesosome concept." Zasadzinski first groups the small vesicles with ligand-receptor interactions and then takes advantage of a lipid self-assembly process similar to natural endocytosis to create the double-bagged vesosome. It can have several separate compartments--like organelles in a cell. He now holds a patent for the vesosome, and is preparing it for commercial use. "This directed self-assembly is a tour-de-force of creative colloid science," Kaler says.

After box boy, Zasadzinski went on to earn a B.S. in chemical engineering at Caltech and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota. He did postdoctoral work at AT&T Bell Laboratories and has been at UC Santa Barbara since 1986.

In microscopy and in new material creation, Zasadzinski is an intrepid explorer, one whose discoveries inspire a cascade of follow-up theoretical and experimental work, according to William M. Gelbart, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA. "His work has been consistently characterized by an artful and commanding marriage of state-of-the-art microscopies and simple physical insights," Gelbart says.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Colloid & Surface Chemistry.--LOUISA DALTON