Congratulations to chemistry professors Clayton H. Heathcock and T. Don Tilley, who received major awards from the American Chemical Society at its annual meeting in Orlando in April.

Heathcock was awarded the Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods. During his career at Berkeley, Heathcock has designed and carried out masterful organic synthesis reactions, including the total synthesis of nearly 50 complex natural products. According to Heathcock, the goal of total synthesis research is not just to be the first to prepare a given compound, but rather to carry out a synthesis in an imaginative way that may not at first be obvious.

Tilley has been honored with the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry sponsored by the Dow Chemical Co. Foundation. His research has focused on developing new synthetic approaches to novel inorganic, organometallic, and organic systems in order to find new chemical transformations, polymers with novel properties, catalysts, and advanced solid-state materials. In some of his latest work, Tilley and his colleagues have designed synthetic pathways to pi-conjugated polymers containing transition-metal centers.

Related sites:

Clayton Heathcock research group page

T. Don Tilley research group page