Fraser Stoddart

Sir James Fraser Stoddart (born 24 May 1942 ) is a British-American chemist who is Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States.

He works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology.

Stoddart has developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilising molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes.

He has demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches.

His group has even applied these structures in the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS).

Fraser Stoddart was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 24 May 1942, the only child of Tom and Jean Stoddart.

He was brought up as a tenant farmer on Edgelaw Farm, a small community consisting of three families.

Sir Fraser professes to a passion for Jigsaw puzzles and construction toys in his formative years, which he believes was the basis for his interest in molecular construction.

Fraser Stoddart was a shy and serene boy and young man.

He received early schooling at the local village school in Carrington, Midlothian, before going on to Melville College in Edinburgh.

He started at the University of Edinburgh in 1960 where he initially studied chemistry, physics and mathematics He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry in 1964 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in 1966 for research on natural gums in Acacias supervised by Sir Edmund Langley Hirst and D M W Anderson from the University of Edinburgh.

In 1967, he went to Queen's University (Canada) as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow.

In 1970 he moved to the University of Sheffield as an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Research Fellow, before joining the academic staff as a lecturer in chemistry.

In early 1978 he was a Science Research Council Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Later in 1978, he was transferred to the ICI Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn, England where he first started investigating the mechanically interlocked molecules that would eventually become molecular machines.

He was awarded a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1980 for his research into stereochemistry beyond the molecule.

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 colours to highlight different parts of the molecules.

At the end of the three year secondment he returned to Sheffield where he was promoted to a Readership in 1982.

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.

His efforts have been recognized by numerous awards, including the 2007 King Faisal International Prize in Science.

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

He went on to be the Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems (CCIS) at Northwestern University in 2010.

He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 2016 for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

In 2017, Stoddart was appointed a part-time position at the University of New South Wales to establish his New Chemistry initiative at the UNSW School of Chemistry.

In 2019, Stoddart introduced a skincare brand called Noble Panacea.

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

Stoddart is one of only a few chemists of the past quarter century to pioneer a new field in organic chemistry.

By establishing a new field where the main feature is mechanical bonds he has paved the way for molecular recognition, self-assembly processes for template-directed mechanically interlocked syntheses, molecular switches, and motor-molecules.

These advances have formed the basis of the fields of nanoelectronic devices, nanoelectromechanical systems, and molecular machines.

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"