Leverhulme Medal (Royal Society)

Last updated
The premises of the Royal Society, which awards the medal Royal Society 20040420.jpg
The premises of the Royal Society, which awards the medal

The Leverhulme Medal is awarded by the Royal Society every three years "for an outstandingly significant contribution in the field of pure or applied chemistry or engineering, including chemical engineering". [1] It was created in 1960 after a donation by the Leverhulme Trust to mark the 300th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Society, and is accompanied by a £2000 gift. Since its creation, it has been awarded 21 times, and unlike other Royal Society medals such as the Royal Medal, it has never been awarded to the same person multiple times. Citizens of the United Kingdom have won the medal 19 of the 21 times; the two foreign recipients have been Man Mohan Sharma, an Indian citizen who was awarded the medal in 1996 "for his work on the dynamics of multi-phase chemical reactions in industrial processes", and Frank Caruso, an Australian chemical engineer, awarded the medal in 2019. Two Leverhulme Medal winners have also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Archer John Porter Martin, who won the medal in 1963 for "his distinguished and fundamental discoveries in chromatography and its application" and the Nobel Prize in 1952, [2] and Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, who won the medal in 1960 for "his outstanding contributions to physical chemistry" and the Nobel Prize in 1956. [2] Anne Neville became the first woman to receive the award in 2016. [3]

List of recipients

YearNameRationaleNotes
1960 Cyril Norman Hinshelwood "for his outstanding contributions to physical chemistry" [4]
1963 Archer John Porter Martin "for his distinguished and fundamental discoveries in chromatography and its application" [5]
1966 Alec Issigonis "for his distinguished contributions to the design of motor cars, particularly the Morris Minor and Austin and Morris Mini" [6]
1969 Hans Kronberger "for his many distinguished contributions to nuclear reactor research and development and for outstanding leadership in all branches of his field"
1972 John Adams "for his many distinguished work in development of particle accelerators, and plasma physics"
1975 Frank Rose "for his distinguished contributions to the application of chemical science to industry"
1978 Frederick Warner "for his outstanding work as consulting engineer both nationally and internationally in many branches of chemical engineering, particularly control of pollution" [7]
1981 Stanley Hooker "for his work on superchargers of the Merlin engines, the development of the first Rolls Royce jet engines, then Bristol engines including that for the jump jet and, later, the final development of the Rolls Royce RB211 engine"
1984 John Frank Davidson "for his distinguished contributions to chemical engineering, in particular the use of fluidised beds."
1987 George William Gray "for his many contributions to the technologically important field of liquid crystals" [8]
1990 Ray Freeman "for introducing new techniques in high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, particularly the development of two-dimensional Fourier transform methods" [9]
1993 John Rowlinson "distinguished for his contributions to thermodynamics, in particular to an understanding of the physical chemistry of gas–liquid interfaces and surfaces" [10]
1996 Man Mohan Sharma "for his work on the dynamics of multi-phase chemical reactions in industrial processes" [11]
1999 Jack Baldwin "in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the field of organic chemistry including his work on natural products synthesis and biosynthesis, particularly for his research in the b-lactam antibiotic field, initially contributing to biosynthetic problems which paved the way to the study of the enzymology of the process and eventually culminating in the determination of the crystal structure of isopenicillin N synthase" [12]
2002 Nicholas Handy "for his pioneering contributions to the development of the modern methodology of quantum chemistry, which has had an enormous impact on chemistry and molecular biology" [13]
2005 John Knott "for his distinguished contributions to the quantitative scientific understanding of fracture processes in metals and alloys and its engineering applications" [1]
2008 Anthony Cheetham "for the discovery and characterisation of novel materials exhibiting potential for catalysis and storage" [14]
2010 Martyn Poliakoff "for his outstanding contributions in the fields of Green Chemistry and supercritical fluids by the application of chemistry to advance chemical engineering processes" [3]
2013 Konstantin Novoselov "for revolutionary work on graphene, other two‐dimensional crystals and their heterostructures that has great potential for a number of applications, from electronics to energy." [3]
2016 Anne Neville "for revealing diverse physical and chemical processes at interacting interfaces, emphasising significant synergy between tribology and corrosion and in addition for exceptional research which has enhanced understanding of basic processes and addressed major industrial problems." [3]
2019 Frank Caruso "for driving the application of engineered particles in biology and medicine through nanoscale materials engineering" [3]
2022 Charlotte Williams "for her pioneering work developing and understanding high performance carbon dioxide utilization catalysts and implementable processes" [3]

Related Research Articles

Roald Hoffmann Nobel laureate organic and inorganic chemist

Roald Hoffmann is a Polish-American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has also published plays and poetry. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linus Pauling</span> American scientist (1901–1994)

Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, and as of 2000, he was rated the 16th most important scientist in history. For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of four people to have won more than one Nobel Prize. Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.

Gerhard Herzberg German-Canadian physicist and physical chemist

Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, was a German-Canadian pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals". Herzberg's main work concerned atomic and molecular spectroscopy. He is well known for using these techniques that determine the structures of diatomic and polyatomic molecules, including free radicals which are difficult to investigate in any other way, and for the chemical analysis of astronomical objects. Herzberg served as Chancellor of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada from 1973 to 1980.

Yuan T. Lee Taiwanese chemist and Nobel Laureate

Yuan Tseh Lee is a Taiwanese chemist and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate who, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudolph A. Marcus</span> Canadian chemist

Rudolph Arthur Marcus is a Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems". Marcus theory, named after him, provides a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for describing one electron outer-sphere electron transfer. He is a professor at Caltech, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

Nikolay Semyonov Soviet physical chemist

Nikolay Nikolayevich Semyonov, was a Soviet physicist and chemist. Semyonov was awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the mechanism of chemical transformation.

Man Mohan Sharma Indian chemical engineer (born 1937)

Man Mohan Sharma FREng is an Indian chemical engineer. He was educated at Jodhpur, Mumbai, and Cambridge. At age 27, he was appointed Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. He later went on to become the Director of UDCT, the first chemical engineering professor to do so from UDCT.

John Polanyi Hungarian chemist (born 1929)

John Charles Polanyi, is a Canadian chemist of ethnic Hungarian origin. He won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his research in chemical kinetics. Polanyi was born in Berlin, Germany prior to his family emigrating in 1933 to the United Kingdom where he was subsequently educated at the University of Manchester, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Princeton University in New Jersey. Polanyi's first academic appointment was at the University of Toronto, and he remains there as of 2019. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Polanyi has received numerous other awards, including 33 honorary degrees, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. Outside his scientific pursuits, Polanyi is active in public policy discussion, especially concerning science and nuclear weapons. His father, Mihály (Michael), was a noted chemist and philosopher. His uncle Karl Polanyi was a renowned political-economist, best known for his seminal work, The Great Transformation. According to György Marx he was one of "The Martians", a group of prominent Hungarian scientists who emigrated to the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

Archer Martin British chemist

Archer John Porter Martin was a British chemist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of partition chromatography with Richard Synge.

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood British Nobel laureate and chemist

Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood was a British physical chemist and expert in chemical kinetics. His work in reaction mechanisms earned the 1956 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Fraser Stoddart Scottish chemist and 2016 Nobel Laureate

Sir James Fraser Stoddart 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). His efforts have been recognized by numerous awards including the 2007 King Faisal International Prize in Science. 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.

Henry F. Schaefer III American theoretical chemist

Henry Frederick "Fritz" Schaefer III is a computational and theoretical chemist. He is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Thomson Reuters H-Index of 121 as of 2020. He is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia.

Kendall Houk American chemist

Kendall Newcomb Houk is a Distinguished Research Professor in Organic Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research group studies organic, organometallic, and biological reactions using the tools of computational chemistry. This work involves quantum mechanical calculations, often with density functional theory, and molecular dynamics, either quantum dynamics for small systems or force fields such as AMBER, for solution and protein simulations.

Sir Rex Edward Richards was a British scientist and academic. He served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and as a director of the Leverhulme Trust.

Arieh Warshel Israeli chemist, biochemist and biophysicist (born 1940)

Arieh Warshel is an Israeli-American biochemist and biophysicist. He is a pioneer in computational studies on functional properties of biological molecules, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and holds the Dana and David Dornsife Chair in Chemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".

Roger Y. Tsien American biochemist

Roger Yonchien Tsien was an American biochemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, in collaboration with organic chemist Osamu Shimomura and neurobiologist Martin Chalfie. Tsien was also a pioneer of calcium imaging.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry One of the five Nobel Prizes established in 1895 by Alfred Nobel

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. This award is administered by the Nobel Foundation, and awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on proposal of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry which consists of five members elected by the Academy. The award is presented in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel's death.

Société chimique de France

The Société Chimique de France (SCF) is a learned society and professional association founded in 1857 to represent the interests of French chemists in a variety of ways in local, national and international contexts. Until 2009 the organization was known as the Société Française de Chimie.

Ben Feringa Dutch Nobel laureate in chemistry

Bernard Lucas Feringa is a Dutch synthetic organic chemist, specializing in molecular nanotechnology and homogeneous catalysis. He is the Jacobus van 't Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences, at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry, University of Groningen, Netherlands, and an Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Jean-Pierre Sauvage, "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines".

Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford Department of the University of Oxford

The Department of Chemistry is the chemistry department of the University of Oxford, England, which is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division

References

General

Specific

  1. 1 2 "The Leverhulme Medal (1960)". The Royal Society. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  2. 1 2 "All Nobel Laureates in Chemistry". The Nobel Prize Foundation. Retrieved 28 January 2009.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Leverhulme Medal". The Royal Society. Retrieved 11 January 2017.
  4. "Sir Cyril Hinshelwood – Biography". Nobel Prize Foundation. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  5. "Archer J.P. Martin – Biography". Nobel Prize Foundation. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  6. The Beaulieu Encyclopedia of the Automobile. Taylor & Francis. 2000. ISBN   9781579582937 . Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  7. "Papers and correspondence of Sir Frederick Warner". Mimas. Archived from the original on 29 June 2012. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  8. "The Scientist: Royal Society Medals and Awards". The Scientist. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  9. "Annual Report: Awards, Prizes and Appointments". Cambridge University. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  10. Sleeman, Elizabeth (2003). The International Who's Who 2004. Routledge. ISBN   9781857432176 . Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  11. "Prof. Man Mohan Sharma". University of Auckland. Archived from the original on 12 January 2009. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  12. "Oxford University Gazette, Thursday 11 November 1999". Oxford University. 11 November 1999. Archived from the original on 10 June 2011. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  13. "International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science – Members – Nicholas C. Hardy". International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. Archived from the original on 20 August 2008. Retrieved 27 January 2009.
  14. "Functional Inorganics and Hybrid Materials: Anthony K. Cheetham resume". University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on 1 July 2010. Retrieved 27 January 2009.