Four academics in Bristol’s School of Chemistry have received individual prizes from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and a project involving academics from the Schools of Chemistry, Biological Sciences and Biochemistry has picked up a fifth award for 'world-leading collaborative research'.
Professor Varinder Aggarwal has been awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry 2013 Perkin Prize for Organic Chemistry ‘for truly original contributions to the field of synthetic organic chemistry that have been sustained, broad-ranging and substantial, particularly with respect to work in the field of asymmetric synthesis and catalysis’.
Professor Jonathan Reid has been awarded the 2013 Corday-Morgan Prize to for 'outstanding achievements in the study of physical and chemical properties of aerosol particles'. The Corday-Morgan Prize is awarded to researchers aged 40 or younger at the time of their nomination for 'the most meritorious contributions to chemistry'. Professor Reid joins a list of eminent previous winners including 15 current or former members of the School of Chemistry.
Professor Guy Lloyd-Jones has received the 2013 Physical Organic Chemistry Award and the associated Sir Christopher Ingold Lectureship ‘for creative work in the investigation of reaction mechanisms in organic and organometallic chemistry’.
Dr John Bower has been awarded the 2013 Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize ‘for development of a wide range of novel transition metal catalysed processes of fundamental utility in organic synthesis’.
Professor Tom Simpson FRS and the Bristol Polyketides Group have been awarded the 2013 RSC Rita and John Cornforth Award ‘for world-leading collaborative research across the disciplines of chemical synthesis, analysis, structural elucidation, molecular genetics, enzymology and structural biology towards understanding and exploiting the biosynthesis of polyketides and fatty acids’.
This Award recognises Professor Simpson for his ‘broad expertise in natural products chemistry’, along with other senior members of the Bristol Polyketides Group, namely: Professors Chris Willis, for her work on organic synthesis and isotope chemistry, and Russell Cox for his work on molecular genetics and enzyme mechanisms, and Drs John Crosby, for bioanalytical and protein chemistry and mass spectrometry, Matt Crump, for biological NMR, and Chris Arthur, for high sensitivity chemical and biological mass spectrometry.
The Award also recognises Drs Colin Lazarus and Andy Bailey, from the School of Biological Sciences, for fungal genetics and fungal microbiology respectively and Dr Paul Race, from the School of Biochemistry, for PKS protein crystallography together with Professor Chris Thomas (from the University of Birmingham) for bacterial molecular genetics. The invaluable contributions of Zongshu Song, whose expertise in microbiology and molecular biology underpins most of the work in Bristol, should also be mentioned.