Professor Ken Houk has been awarded the 2024 Prix Franco-Américain (French-American Prize) from the Société Chimique de France (French Chemical Society).
The ceremony on April 29, 2025, held at the Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris, was an occasion during which seven biennial Grand Prizes were presented to French citizens and eight to chemists, including Houk, from eight different countries outside France.
From the Société Chimique de France announcement (updated by K.N. Houk):
Kendall N. Houk
Professor at the University of California from 1986 to 2021, Saul Weinstein Chair in Organic Chemistry from 1999-2021, Kendall N. Houk has been a Distinguished Research Professor since 2021.
This award is given for his outstanding contributions to molecular chemistry and biochemistry, particularly his theoretical descriptions of reaction mechanisms. His molecular dynamics methods made it possible to discuss bifurcations in reactions that can lead to two products from a single transition state: a modeling challenge that he resolved for a variety of pericyclic reactions. His theoretical research on the mechanisms and design of enzyme-catalyzed reactions led to the concept of “theozymes,” which he created.
Author of 1,650 publications (and h-index of 151), he has received an impressive number of distinctions: Roger Adams Prize in 2021 (the most important in organic chemistry given by the ACS), and the Foresight Feynman Theory Prize in 2021. He is thus recognized by the experimental community and the community of theorists.
His important collaboration with France has led to around twenty publications with researchers from numerous laboratories: Rennes (Grée, Soulé) Paris (Cossy), Mulhouse (Blanchard), Saclay (Taran), and Strasbourg (Wencel-Delord, Hoveyda).
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penjen@g.ucla.edu.
