UCLA chemists receive 2024 Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Prizes

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UCLA chemists receive 2024 Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Prizes

The Royal Society of Chemistry has honored three teams led or co-led by UCLA faculty members with 2024 Horizon Prizes for achievements “at the cutting edge of research and innovation” in their field. The awards, part of a new family of society prizes that launched in 2020, go to select groups, teams and collaborations of any form or size.

UCLA faculty honorees include:

  • Neil Garg, the Kenneth N. Trueblood Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
  • Kendall Houk, holder of UCLA’s distinguished research chair in chemistry and biochemistry
  • Yu Huang, the Traugott and Dorothea Frederking Endowed Professor and chair of the materials science and engineering department at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering
  • Xiangfeng Duan, professor of chemistry and biochemistry
  • Anastassia Alexandrova, professor of chemistry and biochemistry
  • Jun Chen, assistant professor of bioengineering at UCLA Samueli
  • Daniel Nasrallah, assistant adjunct professor of chemistry

The Molecular Strainers Team at UCLA

Led by Garg and Houk, a team of experimental and theoretical chemists from UCLA received the society’s Perkin Prize in Physical Organic Chemistry for the creative advancement of strained intermediates involving cumulated cyclic dienes and trienes. This development is exciting for both fundamental chemistry knowledge and potential applications, as it offers synthetic chemists a new way to create bonds and forge ring structures that were previously unexplored. As these methods can be applied to the synthesis of complex molecules, the team hopes they will be valuable to industries such as pharmaceuticals.

The Van der Waals Thin Film Team

Co-led by Duan, Huang and Chen, a team of researchers at UCLA received the Materials Chemistry Horizon Prize for the development of van der Waals thin films with high electronic performance, mechanical stretchability and permeability for highly flexible, adaptable and breathable bioelectronic membranes. The advance provides the foundation for a new generation of electronics that can seamlessly integrate with living things. The UCLA group collaborated with Hunan University and the University of Texas at Austin on the project.

The Electrical Transport Spectroscopy Team

Co-led by Duan, Alexandrova and Huang, a team of researchers at UCLA and California Institute of Technology have been named winners of the society’s Faraday Horizon Prize, an honor that recognizes significant and novel discoveries or advances in the area of physical chemistry. The team made a breakthrough in understanding how water interacts with the surface of platinum, which is crucial for clean energy technologies like hydrogen fuel cells. They have invented a new method to directly probe the water structure at the platinum surface, to examine how the hydrogen atoms within it are arranged and how these factors influence the chemical reactions that occur on the platinum.

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