Fraser Stoddart was born in
Edinburgh,
Scotland, on 24 May 1942, the only child of Tom and Jean Stoddart.[18][19] He was brought up as a tenant farmer on Edgelaw Farm, a small community consisting of three families. Sir Fraser professes a passion for jigsaw puzzles and construction toys in his formative years, which he believes was the basis for his interest in molecular construction.[20] Fraser Stoddart was a shy and serene boy and young man.[18][19]
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.[25] At the end of the three year secondment he returned to Sheffield[26] where he was promoted to a Readership in 1982.
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.[28]
In 2008, he established the Mechanostereochemistry Group and was named Board of Trustees Professor in Chemistry at Northwestern University.[29] He went on to be the Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems (CCIS) at Northwestern University in 2010.[30]
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.[31]
In 2019, Stoddart introduced a skincare brand called Noble Panacea.[32]
During 35 years, nearly 300 PhD students and
postdoctoral researchers have been trained in his laboratories.[21]
Research
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.[33][2]
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[38]
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. The different colours 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). The distinctive colouring has led to coining the term 'little blue box' for cyclophane, an important π-acceptor used to synthesize mechanically bonded structures.[25] Stoddart maintains this standardized colour 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.[41][42]
ISI ratings
As of 2022[update] Stoddart has an
h-index of 175.[43] As of 2016 he had published more than 1000 publications and holds at least ten patents.[44] 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.
Stoddart was appointed a
Knight Bachelor in the New Year's Honours December 2006, by
Queen Elizabeth II for Services to Chemistry and Molecular Nanotechnology.[26][47]
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.[48]
Stoddart is an
American and
British citizen. Stoddart was married to Norma Agnes Scholan from 1968[5][6][7] until her death in 2004 from cancer.[25] Norma Stoddart obtained a PhD in biochemistry and helped support the research efforts of her husband at the Universities of Sheffield, Birmingham, and California, Los Angeles.[69] Stoddart has two daughters; Fiona and Alison.
Philanthropy
The Fraser and Norma Stoddart Prize for PhD students has been established at their alma mater, the University of Edinburgh.[6] It was given for the first time in 2013.[70]
References
^
abcAnon (1994).
"Sir James Stoddart FRS". royalsociety.org. London:
Royal Society. Archived from
the original on 15 August 2016. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
^
abcCapecelatro, Alex N. (2007). "From Auld Reekie to the City of Angels, and all the Meccano in between: A Glimpse into the Life and Mind of Sir Fraser Stoddart" (PDF). The UCLA USJ. 20. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 March 2016. Retrieved 27 May 2016.
^
ab"Sir J. Fraser Stoddart – Facts". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 18 November 2018.
^"It's all Kids Stuff". FP News, The magazine and Annual Review of The Stewart's Melville FP Club. Daniel Stewart's and Melville College Former Pupils Club. December 2014. pp. 13–14. Retrieved 29 July 2015.
^Stoddart, J. Fraser (2009). "The chemistry of the mechanical bond". Chemical Society Reviews. 38 (6). Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC): 1802–1820.
doi:
10.1039/b819333a.
ISSN0306-0012.
PMID19587969.