J. Fraser Stoddart

James 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. He stood down from the former on July 31, 2007 and relinquished the latter on December 31, 2007 in order to join the faculty at Northwestern University as a Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry on January 1, 2008. On March 1, 2008, he was appointed an Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at UCLA. He is also Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems (CCIS) at Northwestern University.

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), the Nagoya Gold Medal in Organic Chemistry (2004), the King Faisal International Prize in Science (2007), the Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (2007), the Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2007), the Foresight Nanotech Institute Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Experimental) (2007), the American Chemical Society’s Cope Award (2008), and the Royal Society's Davy Medal (2008). 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. He received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Twente (2006), Sheffield University (2008), Trinity College Dublin (2009), and the University of St Andrews (2010). He is currently on the international advisory boards of numerous journals, including Chemistry World, ChemPlusChem, Macromolecular Rapid Communications and Organic Letters. He is editor-in-chief of Applied Nanoscience. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1994), the German Academy (Leopoldina) 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). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012) and the National Academy of Sciences (2014). He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2008) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (2011). He was appointed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as a Knight Bachelor in her 2007 New Year’s Honours List for his services to chemistry and molecular nanotechnology. In 2010 he was the recipient of a Royal Medal, granted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and presented by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

In addition to being made an Honorary Professor at (i) the East China University of Science and Technology (2005) in Shanghai, (ii) Jilin University (2012) in Changchun as well as the Carnegie Centenary Visiting Professor at the Scottish Universities in 2005 and a World Class University (WCU) faculty at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2011 and 2012, Stoddart has been awarded named lectureships by, inter alia, the following universities — Alberta, Alabama, SUNY Albany, Appalachian State, Arkansas, Australian National University, Baylor, Brigham Young, Berkeley, Bristol, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dalhousie, Dartmouth, Dundee, Edinburgh, ETH Zurich, Georgia Institute of Technology, Hebrew Jerusalem, Illinois Institute of Technology, Iowa, John Innes Center, Hamilton, Kaiserslautern, Kansas, Karlsruhe, Louvain La Neuve, Manitoba, Meadville, McGill, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri-St Louis, Montreal, Nevada, New Orleans, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Purdue, Queen's Kingston, Regensburg, Rochester, Saskatoon, Simon-Fraser, Song Sil, Strasbourg, Stony Brook, Sydney, Texas Austin, Texas A&M, Texas Christian, Vanderbilt, Victoria, Wesleyan, West Florida, Western Ontario, Wichita State, 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.

Stoddart was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 2016 for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.