Main navigation | Main content
Professor Donna G. Blackmond from the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, will present the Gassman Lectureship in Chemistry, Monday, April 22, through Thursday, April 25. She will present three lectures:
4:15 p.m. Monday, April 22, 331 Smith Hall, Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis: A Powerful Methodology for Streamlining Mechanistic Analysis of Organic Catalytic Reactions (a reception follows in the Kate & Michael Barany Conference Room, 117/119 Smith Hall);
9:45 a.m. Tuesday, April 23, 331 Smith Hall, A New Paradigm for Stereocontrol in Organocatalysis;
9:45 a.m. Thursday, April 25, 331 Smith Hall, Physical and Chemical Models or the Origin of Biological Homochirality
Blackmond received a doctorate in chemical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984. She has held professorships in chemistry and in chemical engineering in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and she has worked in industrial research in the pharmaceutical industry. In 2010, she moved from a research chair at Imperial College London to her present position as professor of chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
Blackmond has received Royal Society of Chemistry awards in Physical Organic Chemistry and in Process Technology, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and an American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award. She has been a Woodward Visiting Scholar at Harvard, and a Miller Institute Research Fellow at Berkeley. She received the Max Planck Society’s Award for Outstanding Women Scientists, and she was an National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator. She has received the Paul H. Emmett Award in Fundamental Catalysis from the North American Catalysis Society and the Paul Rylander Award from the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society. In 2013, Blackmond was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
Professor Blackmond’s research focuses on kinetic and mechanistic studies of catalytic reactions for pharmaceutical applications, including asymmetric catalysis as well as on fundamental investigations of the origin of biological homochirality.