2025 Seaborg Symposium Speakers

About Sir Fraser Stoddart

(1942-2024)

The academic career of Fraser Stoddart, who was born in the capital of Scotland on 24 May 24 1942, can be traced from Edinburgh to Hong Kong with interludes in Canada (Kingston), in Sheffield and Birmingham in England, in Los Angeles CA and in Evanston IL. His formal education began attending the local village school in Carrington, Midlothian at the age of four, followed by Melville College, a high school in Edinburgh. He graduated from Edinburgh University with a BSc degree in 1964. He cut his teeth in research investigating the nature of plant gums of the Acacia genus within the School of Carbohydrate Chemistry under Professor Sir Edmund Hirst.

In March 1967, Stoddart left the Chemistry Department at Edinburgh with a PhD degree to spend three years as a National Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University with Professor J K N Jones. No sooner had he arrived in Kingston than a communication appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society by Charles Pedersen describing the synthesis of dibenzo[18]crown-6 in excellent yield as a consequence of the templating action of potassium ions. This seminal event marked the beginning of Stoddart’s fascination with chemistry beyond the molecule, which, combined with his interest in templation, led to the template-directed synthesis, based on molecular recognition and self-assembly processes, of a wide range of mechanically interlocked molecules, e.g., catenanes and rotaxanes. See The Nature of the Mechanical Bond: From Molecules to Machines (Wiley, 2016) written in conjunction with former graduate student, Carson Bruns.

In 1970, he returned to the United Kingdom to take up an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Fellowship at Sheffield University before being appointed to a Lectureship in Chemistry. After spending a three-year sabbatical (1978–1981) at the ICI Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn, he returned to Sheffield University where he was promoted to a Readership in Chemistry. It was during his time at ICI that Stoddart developed his long-standing interest in compounds containing bipyridinium units as redox-addressable molecular building blocks for incorporation into bistable catenanes and rotaxanes. These mechanically interlocked molecules were introduced as switches into molecular electronic devices and employed subsequently in the syntheses of artificial molecular machines.

In 1990, he was appointed to the Chair of Organic Chemistry at Birmingham University where he subsequently became the Head of the School of Chemistry (1993–97) before moving to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as the Saul Winstein Professor of Chemistry in 1997. In 2002, he became the Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and was appointed to the Fred Kavli Chair of NanoSystems Sciences. He joined the faculty at Northwestern University in 2008 as a Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and was Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems (CCIS) from 2010 to 2017. Before his passing, he held a two-month appointment as a Board of Trustees Professor at Northwestern University and a one-month appointment as a Professor of Chemistry at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

In 2014, he was appointed to a Thousand Talent Scholarship at Tianjin University in China, in 2015, to an Honorary Professorship of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham in the UK, and in 2020, to the Deanship of the Stoddart Institute of Molecular Science in Zhejiang University in China. Stoddart was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the German Academy (Leopoldina) of Natural Sciences, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Australian Academy of Science.

Stoddart was appointed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as a Knight Bachelor in her 2007 New Year’s Honours List for services to chemistry and molecular nanotechnology. In this same year, he won the King Faisal International Prize in Science, and in 2010 he was awarded a Royal Medal, presented by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. In 2016, he was a recipient, along with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage, of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the design and synthesis of molecular machines. Stoddart published more than 1300 scientific papers. He trained and mentored >500 graduate and postdoctoral students of which >100 have subsequently embarked on successful independent academic careers, while others occupy influential positions in industry and scientific publishing houses.

About the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal

The Glenn T. Seaborg Medal was established in 1987 by the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry to honor individuals for their significant contributions to chemistry and biochemistry. The medal is awarded annually. The recipient is chosen by the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry Executive Committee. Dr. Seaborg’s life, work and contributions are best characterized by one word – excellence.

To learn more, please read Dr. Seaborg’s biography. For a list of previous Seaborg Medal recipients please visit the previous recipients webpage.