J Fraser Stoddart Short Career History Fraser Stoddart (b 1942) received his BSc (1964) and PhD (1966) degrees from Edinburgh University. In 1967, he went to Queen’s University (Canada) as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, and then, in 1970, to Sheffield University as an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Research Fellow, before joining the academic staff as a Lecturer in Chemistry. He was a Science Research Council Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978. After spending a sabbatical (1978-81) at the ICI Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn, he returned to Sheffield where he was promoted to a Readership in 1982. He was awarded a DSc degree by Edinburgh in 1980 for his research into stereochemistry beyond the molecule. In 1990, he took up the Chair of Organic Chemistry at Birmingham University and was Head of the School of Chemistry there (1993-97) before moving to UCLA as the Saul Winstein Professor of Chemistry in 1997. In July 2002, he became the Acting Co-Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). On May 1, 2003, he was appointed the Director of the CNSI and assumed the Fred Kavli Chair of NanoSystems Sciences. 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 (NEMS). His work has been recognized by many awards, including the Carbohydrate Chemistry Award of The Chemical Society (1978), the International Izatt-Christensen Award in Macrocyclic Chemistry (1993), the American Chemical Society’s Cope Scholar Award (1999), and the Nagoya Gold Medal in Organic Chemistry (2004). He was one of ca. 20 research scientists to be invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to participate in the Nobel Jubilee Symposium on “Frontiers of Molecular Sciences” in Stockholm in December 2001. In 2005, he received the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science from Birmingham University, as well as being the recipient of the University of Edinburgh Alumnus of the Year 2005 Award. In late 2006, he will receive an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Twente. He is currently on the international advisory boards of numerous journals, including Angewandte Chemie and the Journal of Organic Chemistry. He is the editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry Series of Monographs on Supramolecular Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1994), the German Academy of Natural Sciences (1999), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005), and the Science Division of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006). In addition to being made an Honorary Professor at the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai and the Carnegie Centenary Visiting Professor at the Scottish Universities in 2005, Stoddart has been awarded named lectureships by, inter alia, the following universities – Alberta, Albany (SUNY), Brigham Young, Berkeley (UC), Bristol, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dalhousie, Dundee, Edinburgh, ETH Zurich, Hebrew, Kaiserslautern, Kansas, Karlsruhe, Louvain La Neuve, McGill, Minnesota, Missouri-St Louis, Georgia Institute of Technology, Montreal, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Purdue, Regensburg, Rochester, Saskatoon, Simon-Fraser, Song Sil, Strasbourg, Sydney, Texas Austin, Texas A&M, Texas Christian, Vanderbilt, Victoria, Western Ontario, Wesleyan, Wisconsin, and Yale. He has also been Middle Rhine (1982), Troisième Cycle en Chemie (1988), and Atlantic Coast (1993) Lecturer. He went on Royal Society Lecture Tours of the USSR and Japan in 1986 and 1987, respectively. Some measure of the influence and impact of Stoddart's work may be drawn from citation statistics. Four of his >790 publications have been cited over 500 times, 11 over 300, 54 over 100, and 155 over 50. He has an h-index of 78. For the period from January 1997 to February 28, 2007, he is ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information as the third most cited chemist with a total of 12,840 citations from 293 papers at a frequency of 43.8 citations per paper. He has given almost 700 plenary/invited lectures. During 37 years, >280 PhD and postdoctoral students have passed through his laboratories and been inspired by his imagination and creativity, and >60 have subsequently embarked upon successful independent academic careers.
Research Interests and Philosophy Molecular compounds, comprised of mechanically interlocked components, can now be obtained[1-4] efficiently using template-directed protocols that rely upon supramolecular assistance to covalent synthesis. Since the weak noncovalent interactions that orchestrate the synthesis of such compounds—e.g., catenanes and rotaxanes—containing mechanical bonds live on between the components inside the molecules thereafter, they can be activated such that their components move with respect to each other in either a linear fashion (e.g., the ring component along the rod of the dumbbell component of a [2]rotaxane as in a molecular shuttle[5]) or a rotary manner (e.g., one ring in a [2]catenane circumrotating through the other ring as in a bistable switch[6]). Thus, [2]rotaxanes can be likened to linear motors and [2]catenanes to rotary motors. Moreover, these molecules can be activated[7-9] by switching the recognition elements on and off between the components chemically, electrically, and optically such that they perform motions—e.g., shuttling actions or muscle-like elongations and contractions—reminiscent of the moving parts in macroscopic machines. Such motor-molecules and molecular machines hold considerable promise10 for the fabrication[11-16] of sensors, actuators, amplifiers and switches at the nanoscale level. Professor Stoddart and his research group work primarily in four different areas, recognizing that chemistry is about three Ms — Making, Measuring and Modeling: (1) unnatural product synthesis that is either kinetically or thermodynamically controlled; (2) physical organic chemistry, principally as it relates to chemical topology and supramolecular phenomena; (3) design and construction of artificial molecular machinery, with actuators and switches particularly in mind; (4) the application of nanoscale chemistry to fundamental problems at the interfaces with materials science and the life sciences. A wide range of knowledge and skill sets are required in order to conduct research effectively and efficiently in such an inter- and multidisciplinary environment. Collaboration is encouraged within the Stoddart group and beyond. Presently, it extends departmentally, campus wide, and nationally, as well as into the international arena in a big way. In the education of students — graduate and undergraduate — and postdoctoral scholars, much emphasis is put on the development of presentational skills. Communication is central to the culture of the group. During the past two decades, the Stoddart group has demonstrated how the emergence of the mechanical bond in chemistry has brought with it a real prospect of integrating a bottom-up approach, based on self-assembly and self-organization of motor-molecules, with a top-down approach, based on micro- and nanofabrication, to create nanomechanical systems in order to harness, manipulate and transfer energy on the nanoscale level. It is an approach to nanoscience and nanotechnology that relies fundamentally upon concept transfer from the life sciences into materials science.In the future, Professor Stoddart anticipates (1) the development of new (supra)molecular motors, (2) the designing of methods to induce them to operate coherently and controllably on surfaces and within frameworks as machines[17-19] and functioning devices, (3) the elaboration of integrated power supplies to drive the machines and devices, (4) an integration of bottom-up and top-down procedures for the nano- and microfabrication of molecularly-driven sensors, actuators, amplifiers and switches, (5) an increased understanding and appreciation of the science and engineering that lies behind nanoscale processes, and (6) the emergence of an elite cadre of highly trained scientists and technologists with both broad perspectives and individual expertise in the fields of nanoscience and molecular nanotechnology. All this and more is in the nature of the mechanical bond as it impacts upon chemistry and beyond. [1] A [2]Catenane Made to Order, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 1989, 28, 1396. [2] Self-Assembly in Natural and Unnatural Systems, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 1996, 35, 1154. [3] Synthetic Supramolecular Chemistry, Acc. Chem. Res. 1997, 30, 393. [4] Interlocked Macromolecules, Chem. Rev. 1999, 99, 1643. [5] A Molecular Shuttle, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1991, 113, 5131. [6] A Chemically and Electrochemically Switchable Molecular Device, Nature 1994, 369, 133. [7] Molecular Machines, Acc. Chem. Res. 1998, 31, 405. [8] Artificial Molecular Machines, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2000, 39, 3349. [9] A Photochemically-Driven Molecular-Level Abacus, Chem. Eur. J. 2000, 6, 3558. [10] Switching Devices Based on Interlocked Molecules, Acc. Chem. Res. 2001, 34, 433. [11] Operating Linear Motor-Molecules Mechanically in Condensed Phases, Nano Lett. In press. [12] Electrochemical Detection of the Metastable State of a Bistable [2]Rotaxane Self-Assembled Monolayer on Gold, ChemPhysChem 2004, 5, 111. [13] A [2]Catenane-Based Solid-State Electronically Reconfigurable Switch, Science 2000, 289, 1172. [14] Two-Dimensional Molecular Electronics Circuits, ChemPhysChem 2002, 3, 519. [15] Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube-Based Molecular Switch Tunnel Junctions, ChemPhysChem 2003, 4, 1335. [16] The Molecule-Electrode Interface in Single-Molecule Transistors, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2003, 42, 5706. [17] Working Supramolecular Machines Trapped in Glass and Mounted on a Film Surface, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2001, 40, 2447. [18] An Operational Supramolecular Nanovalve, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2004, 126, 3370. [19] A Molecular Elevator, Science 2004, 303, 1845. J
Fraser Stoddart
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