The Molecular Strainers Team at UCLA, led by Professor Neil Garg and Professor Ken Houk, receives the RSC 2024 Organic Chemistry Horizon Prize: Perkin Prize in Physical Organic Chemistry for the creative advancement of strained intermediates involving cumulated cyclic dienes and trienes.
Horizon Prizes are given by the Royal Society of Chemistry for achievements “at the cutting edge of research and innovation”. The awards are typically given to teams of researchers, rather than to individuals.
This development is exciting for both fundamental chemistry knowledge and potential applications, as it offers synthetic chemists a new way to create bonds and construct ring structures that were previously unexplored. As these methods can be applied to the synthesis of complex molecules, the team hopes they will be valuable to industries such as pharmaceuticals.
The team of experimental and theoretical chemists from UCLA include Garg lab members Nathan J. Adamson, Ana S. Bulger, Evan R. Darzi, Joyann S. Donaldson, Maude Giroud, Francesca M. Ippoliti, Andrew V. Kelleghan, Daniel J. Nasrallah, Bryan J. Simmons, Dominick C. Witkowski, Laura G. Wonilowicz and Michael M. Yamano. Houk lab awardees are Shuming Chen, Bo Li, and Qianzhen Shao. All of their research was carried out at UCLA.
In a series of three recent publications (Nature 2020, Science 2023, Nature 2023), the team showed that these unusual and highly reactive strained compounds can be made, trapped, and harnessed to synthesize complex structures. They developed methods using these previously avoided strained molecules, explored them computationally, and demonstrated their use in multistep synthesis.
This is the second Horizon Prize for Houk and the third Horizon Prize for Garg since the Horizon Prize Awards were created by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2021.
The news was recently featured in a UCLA Newsroom article.
Related Links:
“Winner: 2021 Horizon Prize for Education” (Royal Society of Chemistry)
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
