Invited Speakers
Professor Donna Blackmond The Scripps Research Institute, California, USA
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 she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. 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 a 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 Swedish Academy of Sciences to speak at two Nobel Workshops, “On the Origin of Life” (2006) and “Chiral Matter” (2021).
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