Heck Award
Scott E. Denmark to receive 2016 Heck Award, deliver lecture
10:37 a.m., April 14, 2016--Scott E. Denmark of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive the 2016 Richard F. Heck Award and deliver the 13th annual Heck Lecture at 4 p.m., Wednesday, April 20, in 101 Brown Laboratory on the University of Delaware campus in Newark.
The Richard F. Heck Award and Lecture honors the late Prof. Heck, Willis F. Harrington Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Delaware and a 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Honors Stories
National Medal of Science
Warren Award
Denmark is the Reynold C. Fuson Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the development of new synthetic reactions, including powerful palladium-catalyzed cross couplings of organosilanols, which have exciting implications for revolutionizing the way that chemists construct a wide host of important molecules.
The high impact of his work has been recognized with many awards, including the Frederic Stanley Kipping Award in Silicon Chemistry, the H.C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods, and the Prelog Medal.
By impacting both how chemists make molecules and how chemists think about the fundamental reactivity of transition metals with organic molecules, Denmark embodies the spirit of the Heck lectureship.
The Heck Award and Lectureship was established 2004 by the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in honor of the late Prof. Heck’s seminal contributions in palladium-catalyzed cross couplings and other transition metal-catalyzed transformations.
Heck himself returned to deliver the inaugural lecture in 2004 to a standing-room only crowd in 101 Brown Laboratory. Heck said several times that evening that he was surprised that so many people were interested in “this old chemistry” (“Couldn’t they just read my papers?”), humbly astonished that chemists from all over the region had come to see the man whose science had changed the world.
In 2010, the Nobel Prize committee encouraged the rest of the world to celebrate his accomplishments by awarding Prof. Heck, Prof. Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University and Prof. Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis.”
Each year the Heck lecture continues to be an outstanding event, which has brought leading researchers in transition metal-catalyzed transformations to UD, including three who have now become Nobel Laureates, six who are members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and five who are members of the National Academy of the Sciences.
The Heck lecturers not only bring cutting-edge research from the world’s leading laboratories, but also have provided an opportunity to reflect on the incredible groundbreaking discoveries that occurred in Delaware.
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson