Nobel laureate Stoddart to speak at Clemson April 29

CLEMSON, South Carolina — Nobel laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart will talk about the work that led to his Nobel Prize in chemistry in a lecture open to students, faculty and staff at Clemson on Monday, April 29, 2019, from 3 to 4 p.m. in the Watt Center auditorium.

Stoddart was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in Chemistry in 2016 “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.” He was invited to Clemson on behalf of graduate students in the Department of Chemistry by associate professor Sourav Saha, who received his doctoral degree under Stoddart’s supervision at UCLA. Since 2008, Stoddart has been a Board of Trustees Professor of chemistry at Northwestern University.

Stoddart is also an avid science communicator; he tweets from @sirfrasersays, with 11,500 followers. His Twitter profile says he “mingles art with science” and “wears chemistry proudly on his sleeve”. In an interview for the Nobel website, Stoddart said, “I feel that I must reach out to the young people who are coming into science at the moment. Twitter breaks down a lot of barriers and I become one of them. I was persuaded by my ex-graduate student Stuart Cantrill to start tweeting when I went to Stockholm. I took his advice and I am now labelled as a twitter monster!”

According to a Northwestern website, “Stoddart is one of the few chemists of the past quarter of a century to have created a new field of organic chemistry — namely, one in which the mechanical bond is a pre-eminent feature of molecular compounds. He has pioneered the development of the use of molecular recognition and self-assembly processes in template-directed protocols for the syntheses of two-state mechanically interlocked compounds (bistable catenanes and rotaxanes) that have been employed as molecular switches and as motor-molecules in the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices and nanoelectromechanical systems.”