ACS Midwest Award for Jerry Atwood

Jerry L. Atwood, Curators' Professor and chair of the department of chemistry at the University of Missouri, Columbia, is the recipient of the 2005 ACS Midwest Regional Award for fundamental contributions to understanding intermolecular, intramolecular, and supramolecular interactions.

During the past two decades, Atwood has become a leader in the area of macrocycles, where he has worked particularly with calixarenes and resorcinarenes. As he did in earlier studies with crown ethers, he strives to identify and understand difficult or improbable complexation cases. He identified aromatic and hydrogen bond interactions between calixarenes and various chlorocarbon solvents. He demonstrated that calixarenes could form sandwich complexes with a variety of metals. These compounds led to imaginative and complex self-assembled, hydrogen-bonded capsules that exhibit properties and chemistry that are remarkable. In exploring this, Atwood and coworkers proposed using the principles of Platonic and Archimedean solids to understand supramolecular assemblies. During his career, Atwood has authored or coauthored more than 600 publications.