JoAnne Stubbe’s 2020 Priestly Medal address “The road less traveled—for love of detection, discovery, and all things radical in nature” is now online.
Read Stubbe’s address on the Chemical & Engineering News website here.
The Novartis Professor of Chemistry and Biology, emerita, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stubbe, was awarded the medal in recognition of her work in understanding enzyme mechanisms.
Because the ACS spring national meeting in Philadelphia was canceled due to the coronavirus outbreak, Stubbe did not deliver this talk during the awards dinner as planned. ACS is rescheduling her address for the fall meeting.
Before joining the faculty at Willliams College, Stubbe was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA from 1971-1972 working on synthesizing LSD from tryptophan with Professor Julius Rebek (Scripps) when he was faculty member at UCLA. After a leave of absence from Williams to conduct research at Brandeis University, Stubbe joined the faculty in the Pharmacology Department at Yale University. In 1980 she moved to the Biochemistry Department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In 1987, Stubbe became a professor in the MIT Chemistry Department, where she became the first woman to receive tenure in that department.
Established in 1922, the Priestley Medal is the highest honor conferred by the American Chemical Society (ACS) and is awarded for distinguished service in the field of chemistry.
Read more about Stubbe and the 2020 Priestly medal here.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.