Event

2025 Gilbert Stork Lecture in Organic Chemistry
 
Donna G. Blackmond
The Scripps Research Institute
 
Thursday, April 10, 2025
4:00 PM
Carolyn Hoff Lynch Lecture Hall

Physical and Chemical Models for the Emergence of Biological Homochirality

The single chirality of the amino acids and sugars that make up the building blocks of life has fascinated scientists and laymen alike since Pasteur’s first painstaking separation of the enantiomorphic crystals of a tartrate salt over 150 years ago. In the past several decades, a number of theoretical and experimental investigations have helped to delineate models for how one enantiomer might have come to dominate over the other from what presumably was a racemic prebiotic world. Our work has highlighted mechanisms that include either chemical or physical processes, or a combination of both. While much of the scientific driving force for this work arises from an interest in understanding the origin of life, research focusing on mechanisms for the enantioenrichment of chiral molecules has the potential to impact a wide range of applications, most notably in the synthesis and formulation of pharmaceuticals.

Bio: Donna G Blackmond received a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She has held professorships in chemistry and in chemical engineering in the US (University of Pittsburgh), Germany (Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung), and the UK (University of Hull; Imperial College London), and she has worked in the pharmaceutical industry (Merck). She is Professor of Chemistry, Department Chair, and the John C. Martin Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California. She holds joint US/UK citizenship. 

Prof. Blackmond is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. She has been recognized internationally for her research including the Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Award for Outstanding Women Scientists, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, and the IUPAC Award for Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering. She has been a Woodward Visiting Scholar at Harvard, a Miller Institute Research Fellow at Berkeley, and an NSF Visiting Professor at Princeton. Among other named lectureships, she has been the Merck Distinguished Lecturer at MIT, the Paul Gassmann Lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Givaudan-Karrer Lecturer at University of Zürich, the 8th Anton Vilsmeier Lecturer at the Universität Regensburg, the Lemieux Lecturer at University of Ottawa, the Laird Lecturer at the University of British Columbia, and the Gordon Lecturer at the University of Toronto. In 2021 she received a Humboldt-Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Prof. Blackmond’s research focuses on mechanistic studies of organic reactions, including asymmetric catalysis. She pioneered the methodology of “Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA)” for fundamental mechanistic studies of complex organic reactions as well as for streamlining pharmaceutical process research. Prof. Blackmond is a Simons Investigator in the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life where she studies prebiotic chemistry and the origin of biological homochirality. She has been invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to speak at two Nobel Workshops, “On the Origin of Life” (2006) and “Chiral Matter” (2021).