Fraser Stoddart

Education and early life

Fraser Stoddart was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 24 May 1942. He was brought up on Edgelaw Farm and received early schooling at a local village school in Carrington, Midlothian, before going on to Melville College in Edinburgh. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1964 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in 1967 from the University of Edinburgh the latter for research on natural gums in Acacias supervised by Edmund Langley Hirst and D M W Anderson.

Career

In 1967, he went to Queen’s University (Canada) as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, and then, in 1970, to the University of Sheffield as an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Research Fellow, before joining the academic staff as a Lecturer in Chemistry. He was a Science Research Council Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978. After spending a sabbatical (1978–81) at the ICI Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn, England, he returned to Sheffield where he was promoted to a Readership in 1982.

He was awarded a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1980 for his research into stereochemistry beyond the molecule. In 1990, he moved to the Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Birmingham and was Head of the School of Chemistry there (1993–97) before moving to UCLA as the Saul Winstein Professor of Chemistry in 1997, succeeding Nobel laureate Donald Cram.

In July 2002, he became the Acting Co-Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). In May 2003, he became the Fred Kavli Chair of NanoSystems Sciences and served from then through August 2007 as the Director of the CNSI.

During 35 years, nearly 300 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers have been trained in his laboratories.

In 2008, he established the Mechanostereochemistry Group and was named Board of Trustees Professor in Chemistry at Northwestern University.

Research

One of his major contributions to the development of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as rotaxanes and catenanes has been the establishment of efficient synthetic protocols based on the binding of cyclobis(paraquat-p-phenylene) with electron-rich aromatic guests. His group reported the synthesis of an advanced mechanically interlocked molecular architecture called molecular Borromean rings through the use of dynamic covalent chemistry. The efficient procedures developed to synthesize these molecular architectures has been applied to the construction of molecular switches that operate based on the movement of the various components with respect to one another. These interlocked molecules have potential uses as molecular sensors, actuators, amplifiers, and molecular switches, and can be controlled chemically, electrically, and optically.

"His work bridges the gap between chemistry and the scientific and engineering challenges of nanoelectromechanical systems."

Stoddart has pioneered the use of mechanically interlocked molecular architectures to create nanomechanical systems. He has demonstrated that such devices can be fabricated using a combination of the bottom-up approach of molecular self-assembly and a top-down approach of lithography and microfabrication.

"The credit for making molecular machines attractive to chemists goes to Fraser Stoddart, ... He had the vision to realise that these architectures gave you the possibility of large amplitude-controlled motions, and that that could be the basis of molecular machines." David Leigh

Presentation style

Stoddart's papers and other material are instantly recognizable due to a distinctive "cartoon"-style of representation he has developed since the late 1980s. A solid circle is often placed in the middle of the aromatic rings of the molecular structures he has reported, and different colors to highlight different parts of the molecules. Indeed, he was one of the first researchers to make extensive use of color in chemistry publications. The different colors usually correspond to the different parts of a cartoon representation of the molecule, but are also used to represent specific molecular properties (blue, for example, is used to represent electron-poor recognition units while red is used to represent the corresponding electron-rich recognition units). Stoddart maintains this standardized color scheme across all of his publications and presentations, and his style has been adopted by other researchers reporting mechanically interlocked molecules based on his syntheses.

ISI ratings

As of 2016 Stoddart has an h-index of 130. He has published more than 1000 publications and holds at least ten patents. For the period from January 1997 to 31 August 2007, he was ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information as the third most cited chemist with a total of 14,038 citations from 304 papers at a frequency of 46.2 citations per paper.

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) predicted that Fraser Stoddart was a likely winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with George M. Whitesides and Seiji Shinkai for their contributions to molecular self-assembly. However, the Prize eventually went to Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon.

Awards and honours

Stoddart was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the New Year's Honours December 2006, by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2007, he received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in recognition for his outstanding and pioneering work in molecular recognition and self-assembly, and the introduction of quick and efficient template-directed synthetic routes to mechanically interlocked molecular compounds, which have changed the way chemists think about molecular switches and machines.

Personal life

Stoddart is an American citizen. Stoddart married Norma Agnes Scholan in 1968 and has two daughters.

Philanthropy

The Fraser and Norma Stoddart Prize for Ph.D. students has been established at their alma mater, the University of Edinburgh. It was given for the first time in 2013.