Physical Organic Chemistry Award 2009 winner

Awarded for her work on non-linear effects of catalyst enantiopurity in asymmetric catalysis, and her work on models for the evaluation of biological homochirality.

Donna Blackmond delivered her lecture at a symposium at Imperial College London on Monday 21 September 2009 at which she received her medal.

About the winner

Donna G Blackmond received the PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984. She was a professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh from 1984-1992.

In 1992, she left academia for industrial research, becoming an Associate Director at Merck & Co., Inc., where she was responsible for the setting up of a new laboratory for research and development in the kinetics and catalysis of organic reactions.

From 1996-99, Professor Blackmond was a Research Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1999 to take up the position of Professor and Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Hull.

She joined the faculty at Imperial College London in 2004, where she holds joint professorial appointments in the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering & Chemical Technology as well as the Chair in Catalysis. 

Professor Blackmond holds a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. She received an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the Organic Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society (2005). She was a Woodward Visiting Scholar at Harvard University (2002-2003) and a Miller Institute Research Fellow at University of California, Berkeley (2003).

She received the Royal Society of Chemistry's Award in Process Technology (2003), the North American Catalysis Society's Paul H. Emmett Award (2001), the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society's Raul Rylander Award (2003), and the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986-91).