Carbohydrate Chemistry Award Winners Announced

The ACS Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry has selected recipients of its three awards for 2005. Winners will receive their awards during a dinner ceremony and present a lecture at an awards symposium in the division's program during the fall ACS national meeting in Washington, D.C.

C. Fred Brewer will receive the Melville L. Wolfrom Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry. The award consists of a scroll and an honorarium. Its purpose is to acknowledge "outstanding service to the division and to the field of carbohydrate chemistry."

Brewer is a professor of molecular pharmacology and of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, New York City. He is internationally known for his work on the physical biochemistry of carbohydrate-protein interactions. Most recently, he has focused on the supramolecular assembly of multivalent carbohydrates with lectins, including the concepts of homogeneous and heterogeneous cross-linking interactions. He is also known for his thermodynamic studies of the binding of carbohydrates to lectins, including multivalent carbohydrate-lectin interactions.

Brewer is also known for his long-standing collaboration with the late E. J. Hehre and their studies of the mechanisms of action of glycosidases. Brewer serves on the editorial boards of Glycobiology and Trends in Glycosciences & Glycotechnology. He has served the ACS Carbohydrate Chemistry Division as chair and is a board member of the Society for Glycobiology.

Todd L. Lowary will receive the Horace S. Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry. Consisting of a scroll and an honorarium, the award is given to scientists not over 41 years of age who demonstrate "excellence in and promise of continued quality of contribution to research in carbohydrate chemistry."

Lowary received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry under the supervision of Ole Hindsgaul at the University of Alberta in 1993. He carried out postdoctoral research with David R. Bundle at the University of Alberta (1993-95), and then with Morten P. Meldal at Carlsberg Research Center in Copenhagen (1995-96). In 1996, he accepted a position in the department of chemistry at Ohio State University, Columbus, as an assistant professor and in 2002 was promoted to associate professor with tenure. In 2003, he returned to the University of Alberta, where he is an associate professor in the department of chemistry and a member of the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Carbohydrate Science, a group of six principal investigators at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary who work in the areas of carbohydrate chemistry and glycobiology. In 1999, he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers and the Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. Since 1997, he has been a member of the editorial board of Carbohydrate Research, and he currently serves as an editor of that journal.

Lowary's research program is focused on the areas of synthetic carbohydrate chemistry, the conformational analysis of oligosaccharides, and the identification of novel antituberculosis agents. Of particular interest has been the development of new methods for glycoside bond formation and their application to the synthesis of fragments of furanoside-containing cell wall polysaccharides from the organism that causes tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Other focus areas include the screening of these compounds and related mimetics as potential substrates and inhibitors of mycobacterial glycosyltransferases and detailed conformational analyses of furanose rings.

Zhongwu Guo of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University will receive the 2005 New Investigator Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry. The award consists of a scroll and an honorarium. Its purpose is to acknowledge and encourage outstanding contributions to research in carbohydrate chemistry by scientists at their first independent faculty position. Guo received a B.S. in pharmacy (1984) and an M.S. in medicinal chemistry (1987) from Second Military Medical University in China; and a Ph.D. (1991) in organic chemistry from the Institute of Organic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Science. In 1994, he was appointed to the faculty of Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, and from 1996 to 1999, he was a RIKEN Fellow in Japan and assistant research officer of the National Research Council of Canada. Guo will join Wayne State University, in Detroit, as a professor of chemistry in August 2005.

His research interests are focused on glycosciences, medicinal chemistry, and synthetic organic chemistry. His research projects include new methods for glycopeptide synthesis, synthetic and structural studies of GPI-anchored antigens, carbohydrate-based cancer vaccines, and biomimetic glycomaterials for targeted drug delivery.