CARB Announces 2007 Divisional Awards

The recipients of the ACS Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry (CARB) awards for 2007 have been selected, and awards will be presented during the fall ACS national meeting in Boston.

The Melville L. Wolfrom Award will go to Muthiah Manoharan, vice president of drug discovery at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, Mass. This award is given annually to recognize excellent contributions to the field of carbohydrate chemistry and/or outstanding service to the division.

Manoharan directs chemistry efforts for discovery and development of RNAi-based drugs at Alnylam. Prior to joining the company, Manoharan was executive director of medicinal chemistry at Isis Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company focused on antisense oligonucleotide-based therapeutics. Manoharan earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and completed a postdoc at Yale University. Manoharan is chair-elect of CARB.

Dev P. Arya, associate professor of chemistry at Clemson University, will receive the Horace S. Isbell Award for outstanding contributions to the field of carbohydrate chemistry. The award recognizes carbohydrate scientists under the age of 41 who have demonstrated excellence in the field and show promise of continuing to make high-quality contributions to carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry.

Arya is researching the chemistry and biochemistry of amino sugars and developing new pathways for molecular recognition of nucleic acids. He earned a Ph.D. in 1996 from Northeastern University, Boston, and subsequently completed a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He joined Clemson in 1999.

The New Investigator Award will go to Alexei V. Demchenko, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. The award acknowledges outstanding contributions to research in carbohydrate chemistry by scientists in their first independent faculty position.

Demchenko's research is in the area of synthetic carbohydrate chemistry. He received a Ph.D. in 1993 from the Zelinski Institute of Organic Chemistry, at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow. Prior to joining the University of Missouri, Demchenko was a research associate at the University of Georgia's Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, where he focused on the synthesis of complex oligosaccharides for immunological studies.