2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry

Stuart A. Rice, Ching Tang, and Krzysztof Matyjaszewski have been awarded the 2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry at the Knesset Building in Jerusalem, Israel. Since 1978 the prize, which consists of a certificate and a monetary award of $100,000, is awarded.

The Israel Journal of Chemistry has been recognizing Wolf Prize laureates with special issues dedicated to their work since 1988. The most recent were the 2008 Chemistry recipients, William E. Moerner, Stanford, USA, and Allen J. Bard, University of Texas, USA. For a complete list see the overview of the journal’s history.

Professor Stuart A. Rice, University of Chicago, ILL, USA, born 1932 in the USA. Rice´s original and pioneering investigations both theoretical and experimental into the properties of organic solids helped to define and to characterize a panoply of behaviors, and to conceptualize and formulate a coherent set of concepts, such as exciton behaviors, radiationless transitions, light absorption and emission in organic crystals, charge transport, intramolecular vibrational relaxation, exciton fission and fusion, exchange forces in excitons, and dynamics of triplet excitons in solids.

Professor Ching Tang, University of Rochester, NY, USA, born 1947 in Hong Kong, created two of the most active fields in organic materials, organic light emitting diodes (OLED) and organic photovoltaics (OPV).
Tang also pioneered the inverse process, in which photons incident on an organic crystal, generate electrons and holes that migrate to opposite electrodes, producing a current. This is the first workable example of a solar photovoltaic, based on organic materials.

Professor Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, born 1950 in Poland, has performed groundbreaking research in synthesis of organic materials, and in particular, in the critical area of controlled, efficient, safe and economical polymer synthesis. He invented the process of atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), a versatile and powerful tool, which has permitted the creation of a whole generation of novel polymers and copolymers. In addition to his academic breakthroughs, Matyjaszewski´s research has also had tremendous industrial impact, due to the simplicity of ATRP and its power to prepare tailor-made macromolecules for materials applications, with unprecedented specificity and efficiency.