The Mosher Award for 2014
The Mosher Award is the Santa Clara Valley
Section's most prestigious award. It is given annually to an ACS
member chosen from the national community who has demonstrated
excellence in chemistry, worked to insure advancement of the
chemical profession and has participated fully in the ACS on a
national, regional and local level.
The award was established in 1980 in honor of
Harry and Carol Mosher, two founding members of the Santa Clara
Valley Section, both of whom epitomize these values. The Mosher
award recipient is presented with an engraved plaque and an
honorarium at a dinner meeting of the Section, usually in the
January meeting of the following year.
Click
here for details about the award itself.
The 2013 recipient of the Mosher Award
was Dr. Peter Wipf of the University of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. Dr. Wipf is well qualified and meets
all the criteria for the award. It was presented to him on
January 16, 2014. About 45 people from the local section
attended and his lecture was greatly enjoyed by all.
Biography
Dr. Peter Wipf was born in Aarau,
Switzerland. He received his Dipl. Chem. in 1984 and his Ph.D.
in 1987 from the University of Zürich under the direction of
Professor Heinz Heimgartner. After a Swiss NSF
postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Robert E. Ireland
at the University of Virginia, Dr. Wipf began his appointment at
the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 1990. Since 2004, he
has been a Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry and a
Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He also serves as the
Director of the Center for Chemical Methodologies and Library
Development (UPCMLD). He is a co-Leader of the UPCI Molecular
Therapeutics and Drug Discovery Program. Peter Wipf’s
research includes the total synthesis of natural products,
organometallic chemistry, hetero -cyclic chemistry,
diversity-oriented synthesis, medicinal chemistry and
computational chemistry. At the center of his research program
is the study of chemical reactivity and the use of synthesis to
augment the chemical toolbox and develop new therapeutic
strategies. A major emphasis involves the efficient
preparation of polyfunctionalized nitrogen-containing building
blocks for biological screening and synthesis of natural
products and analogs. The discovery of fundamentally new
reaction pathways is stimulated by exploratory studies of
transition metal complexes, in particular zirconocenes, and
strained rings. One of his compounds, a PI3 kinase inhibitor, is
currently in Phase II clinical trials in the US and Canada.
Among recent awards, Dr. Wipf is a recipient
of the Morley Medal (2013), the Ernest Guenther Award in the
Chemistry of Natural Products (2009), the ISHC Katritzky Award
in Heterocyclic Chemistry (2003), and a Fellow of the
American Chemical Society (2010), the Royal Society of Chemistry
(FRSC, 2004), and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS, 2002). He received the ACS Pittsburgh Award in
2012 and the Chancellor’s Senior Scholar Distinguished Research
Award in 2008. He has been an Associate Editor of ACS Medicinal
Chemistry Letters since 2009. In 1998, he received the Arthur C.
Cope Scholar Award.
The Award Lecture
From Strained Carbocycles to Heterocycles
Cyclopropanes and cyclobutanes are commonly
used as scaffolds for conformational preorganization in
pharmaceutical compounds and for the expansion of molecular
diversity in chemical libraries. A few natural products also
contain these building blocks, and a considerable number of
organic methodolo-gies has focused on their preparation and
synthetic transformation. In contrast, applications of
cyclo[1.1.0]butanes in organic synthesis have been much more
limited. Similarly, there are only a few applications of
methylene cyclopropanes. Our group has been able to expand
bicyclobutane and methylene cyclopropane chemistry toward the
preparation of diverse ring fused pyrrolidines, many of which
represent completely novel scaffolds. We are also applying
this methodology toward the total synthesis of polycyclic
alkaloids.
Peter Wipf, Carol Mosher and
2014 Section Chair Ean Warren
--Howard Peters, Mosher Award Committee Chair
Lois Durham and Natalie McClure, Committee Members
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