Thieme-IUPAC Prize in Synthetic Organic Chemistry for
1996 Announced
Georg Thieme Verlag, the International Union of Pure and Applied
Chemistry and the Editors of Synthesis, Synlett and Houben-Weyl are
pleased to announce the recipient of the
Thieme-IUPAC Prize in Synthetic Organic Chemistry 1996
Eric N. Jacobsen
The Thieme-IUPAC Prize, consisting of DM 10 000, is awarded every two
years on the occasion of the IUPAC International Conference on Organic
Synthesis (ICOS) to a scientist under 40 years of age, whose research
has had a major impact on the field of synthetic organic chemistry.
The third Thieme-IUPAC Prize will be presented at an Award Talk on 2
July 1996 at the ICOS-II in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Eric Jacobsen was born on February 22, 1960 in Manhattan, USA. He was
raised in New York City, and he obtained his B.S. degree from New York
University in 1982. As an undergraduate, he carried out research in
the laboratories of Yorke E. Rhodes. His Ph.D. work was done at University
of California, Berkeley in the field of organometallic chemistry under
the direction of Robert G. Bergman. In 1986, he returned to the East
Coast for a National Institute of Health postdoctoral fellowship at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology with K. Barry Sharpless, where
he was one of the initiators of the asymmetric catalytic dihydroxylation
project. In 1988, he took on a faculty position at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was promoted to associate professor
in 1991. He moved to Harvard University as fill professor in the summer
of 1993, and he currently directs a research group of 20 graduate students
and postdocs at Harvard. He is also a consultant at Merck, Sepracor,
and Versicor.
Eric Jacobsen has emerged as the best young chemist in the world working
at the important frontier of designing/discovering selective catalysts
for use in organic synthesis. He began his career at Illinois in spectacular
fashion with his new process for the asymmetric epoxidation of unfunctionalized
olefins. This was a major accomplishment for both conceptual reasons
and, especially, for practical applications in synthesis. The Jacobsen
catalyst, which was Fluka's reagent of the year in 1994, is a chiral,
catalytically active transition metal complex. The reagent has allowed
an easy access to a number of enantiomerically pure epoxides. A number
of them have allowed expeditious synthesis of pharmacologically active
products. One such example is the synthesis of the taxol side chain.
In Eric Jacobsen's brief time at Harvard, he has continued to be extremely
productive in the area of asymmetric catalysis. This time, he has found
a practical catalytic system for highly enantioselective ring openings
of epoxides and aziridines. As with the Jacobsen epoxidation, this new
process is so simple and efficient that it is essentially ready for
immediate industrial applications. A recent synthetic example is the
synthesis of a prostaglandin chiral building block. This asymmetric
catalytic method represents an attractive alternative to enzyme-based
procedures.
Eric Jacobsen is widely regarded as a most dedicated researcher and
a fearless experimentalist. He is already perceived as a clear leader
in the field of asymmetric catalysis, and we can expect many more exciting
developments from his labs in the discovery and mechanistic elucidation
of new reactions of practical value.
Eric Jacobsen has been the recipient of numerous awards including the
NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Packard Fellowship, the
Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation Fellowship, the Cope Scholar Award, and the Fluka Prize.
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