Oxford chemists recognised with Royal Society of Chemistry prizes
Chemistry researchers from the University of Oxford have been recognised in this year’s Royal Society of Chemistry prizes, celebrating outstanding contributions to research and innovation across the chemical sciences.
Professor Yimon Aye has been awarded the Corday-Morgan Mid-Career Prize for Chemistry. She receives the prize for pioneering contributions to the development of live-cell-based tools that can elucidate, reprogramme and chemically manipulate biological signalling mechanisms.
Professor Aye’s research programme focuses on a nuanced mode of cellular communication and decision-making, which her group has termed “precision electrophile signalling”. These natural reactive small-molecule signals can help cells mount rapid stress responses and survive challenging conditions, but their broad reactivity makes it difficult to distinguish meaningful signalling events from off-target effects.
The Aye lab has pioneered methods to map these chemical signalling events in cultured cells and whole organisms with previously inaccessible biological context and control. The advances enabled by these tools have implications for drug development and for understanding stress-associated disease.
Professor Aye said:
I feel humbled to receive what is an unexpected news for us, as it is also our team’s first UK-based honour; and as always I feel an enormous sense of gratitude for the dedicated efforts of numerous former/present team members that altogether make possible such wider recognitions for our laboratory.
Oxford researchers have also been recognised as part of Team SMOM, winner of the RSC’s Dalton Horizon Prize. The purpose of the Horizon Prizes is to recognise those who are pioneering new techniques, technologies, innovations and discoveries. The team received the prize for developing solid-state molecular organometallic chemistry as a new way of controlling, analysing and using highly reactive transition metal complexes.
Team SMOM’s work offers chemists an alternative to traditional solution-based organometallic chemistry. Because solvents can destabilise highly reactive complexes, the team developed methods that remove solvent entirely, using single-crystal to single-crystal solid–gas reactivity to carry out reactions in the solid state. As they put it, “if the problem is the solvent, the solution is to remove the solvent”.
The approach has allowed researchers to stabilise and study highly reactive metal complexes that would otherwise be difficult to observe, while combining expertise in synthesis, crystallography, catalysis, spectroscopy and theory.
The SMOM team comprises scientists from the University of Oxford as well as Heriot-Watt, St Andrews and York. Oxford-linked members include Timothy Boyd, Alexander Bukvic, F. Mark Chadwick, Antonio Martínez-Martínez, Alasdair McKay, Nicholas Rees and Cameron Royle. The team was led by Professor Andrew Weller, now at the University of York, who was previously Professor of Chemistry at Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College.
Antonio Martínez-Martínez, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford, said:
I am very pleased to see SMOM recognised in this way. For me, it is especially meaningful to have been part of this team during my postdoctoral time in Oxford. Looking back now, I appreciate even more that period and the collective effort behind this recognition.
Dr Helen Pain, CEO of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said:
Winning an RSC Prize is a remarkable achievement. You join the ranks of a star-studded roster stretching back over 150 years, including several dozen who went on to win Nobel Prizes. Our winners are exceptional role models for our communities, and we’re so pleased to be celebrating such an extraordinary cohort this year.
Further information about all of this year’s RSC Prizes can be found on the Royal Society of Chemistry website.
