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Joseph Fox receives NSF Career Award
The award is one of the National Science Foundation’s highest honors for young faculty members, and recognizes and supports the early career development activities of those teachers and scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the future. Fox said he was “very pleased” to learn of the NSF award, particularly given the fact that funding for scientific research “is tight.” Fox said his research group is broadly interested in organic synthesis, which he said is directly relevant to research in academia and in applied settings, such as pharmaceuticals and crop protection. Fox said a key goal is to develop new types of chemical reactions. “Scientists have been trying to develop new chemical reactions for hundreds of years, and we are still not very good at it,” he said. “We don’t have efficient ways to put complex molecules, such as those found in pharmaceuticals, together.” The work is “profoundly important,” he said, because it affects every aspect of science. “When it comes to the rapid synthesis of complex molecules, we are using the equivalent of hand tools,” he said. “We need power tools to do organic synthesis.” Fox and his research team, made up of graduate students Fan Zhang and Dorthey Dong and undergraduate student Rich Karpowicz, will use the NSF funding specifically to work on developing new methods in catalyst design. “With this grant, we hope to draw inspiration from natural catalysts to determine how to design unnatural catalysts,” Fox said. The project explores an alternative approach to catalyst design in which the source of chirality, or the “handedness” of a molecule, is removed from the primary sphere of metal coordination. Metals are the usual source of catalytic organic reactions. Such removal enables the scientist to take full advantage of the large pool of achiral ligands--ligands being molecules that bind certain proteins--that are available for tuning catalyst reactivity and selectivity. Fox explained that complex molecules such as pharmaceuticals have “handedness,” much as humans are either right-handed or left-handed. “When something with handedness interacts with something else with handedness, there are very different ways in which they can interact,” he said, using as an example two people trying to shake hands. “When two people shake hands, they traditionally offer each other their right hands. Imagine if you offered someone your right hand and they offered their left hand instead. The effect would be very different, as you would be shaking the backside of their hand.” Fox added that “when you design any complex molecule, and particularly a pharmaceutical, it is of utmost importance to make a material of single handedness because when a drug ‘shakes hands’ with a receptor in your body, you need to make sure that it is a traditional handshake. Otherwise, the drug will cause side reactions.” To address the issue of chirality, Fox is looking at novel means of directing reactions remotely, as found in nature. His catalysts mimic the means of control utilized by metal-containing enzymes, wherein the environment of the catalyst is strongly influenced and controlled by the surrounding structures, even though they are not directly linked to the metal. This approach will enable researchers to take full advantage of the large pool of molecules that are available for tuning catalyst reactivity and selectivity, while maintaining the requisite high degree of control over the three-dimensional outcome of the catalyzed reactions. In its description of the project, the NSF writes that "the project represents a potential paradigm shift in catalyst design...and offers promise for the development of new and efficient methods for the control of molecular structure. This control is essential in the synthesis of the complex organic molecules generally forming the basis of modern pharmaceutical products." Fox said funding, which is provided through the NSF’s Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, has both research and educational components. On the education side, he plans to continue a consortium that provides remote access to UD’s leading edge nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer facilities to other institutions of higher education in the region, and to work with Douglass F. Taber, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, on development of UD’s organic chemistry honors curriculum. Also, in a collaborative project with chemist and filmmaker Matthew Radcliff, a 1996 UD graduate, Fox said they plan to develop video presentations designed to enhance student understanding and public perception of chemistry. Radcliff is working toward a doctorate in chemistry at Princeton University and a master of fine arts degree from Montana State University. Fox received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Princeton University and a master’s and doctorate from Columbia University. He was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the UD faculty in 2001. Article by Neil Thomas |
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