Vol. 27 No. 4
July-August 2005

2005 IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists

On 25 April 2005, IUPAC announced the winners of the IUPAC Prize for Young Chemists, an award for the best Ph.D. thesis in the chemical sciences as described in a 1000-word essay. The winners are as follows:

• Zev Gartner, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• Jiaxing Huang, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Hiromitsu Maeda, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
• Xun Wang, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

The winners will each receive a cash prize of USD 1000 and a free trip to the IUPAC Congress, 14-19 August 2005, Beijing, China. Each prizewinner has been invited to present a poster at the IUPAC Congress describing his/her award winning work and to submit a short critical review on aspects of their research topics to be published in Pure and Applied Chemistry.

The essays describing the winners’ theses can be found on the IUPAC Web site and cover a wide range of subject matter:

• Dr. Gartner, “The Development of DNA-Templated Organic Synthesis”
• Dr. Huang, “Conducting Polymer Nanofibers: Synthesis, Properties and Applications”
• Dr. Maeda, “Synthesis and Properties of Multiply N-Confused Porphyrins”
• Dr. Wang, “Solution-Based Route to Transitional Metal Oxides One-Dimensional Nanostructures: Synthesis, Characterization, and their Properties”

There were 60 applicants from 22 countries. The Prize Selection Committee was comprised of members of the IUPAC Bureau with a wide range of expertise in chemistry. The committee was chaired by Pieter S. Steyn, IUPAC past president.

In view of the quality of many applications, the committee decided to give four Honorable Mention Awards to the following young chemists:

• Omar Azzaroni, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina
• Suraj Dhungana, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
• Rongchao Jin, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA
• Young-Wook Jun, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea

The Honorable Mention Award winners will receive a cash prize of USD 100 and a copy of the Compendium of Chemical Terminology, the IUPAC “Gold Book.” The awards to the winners of the 2004 prize and those of 2005 will be made during the Opening Ceremony of the Congress in Beijing on Sunday 14 August 2005.

www.iupac.org/news/prize/2005_winners.html