King Faisal honor goes to Stoddart

Work in molecular recognition and self-assembly garnered UCLA professor J. Fraser Stoddart the King Faisal International Prize for Science.

Stoddart, director of the California NanoSystems Institute and UCLA’s Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences, received the prize for chemistry. According to the foundation’s website, he was recognized because his “introduction of quick and efficient template-directed synthetic routes to mechanically interlocked molecular compounds is of seminal importance. It has changed dramatically the way chemists think about molecular systems and how they can be used in the fabrication of molecular switches and machines such as molecular elevators and shuttles.”

Stoddart and the other six prize-winners for 2007 were announced on 16 January by Prince Khalid Al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, director of the King Faisal Foundation, which bestows the honors. The awards were distributed in a March ceremony held in Riyadh under the auspices of the king of Saudi Arabia. Each prizewinner received a leather-bound certificate in Arabic calligraphy describing the work for which he was awarded the prize; a 24-carat, 200-gram gold medallion; and 750 000 Saudi riyals ($200 000).