OBC Editorial Board member Professor Dave Leigh, University of Edinburgh, is the recipient of the 2007 International Izatt-Christensen Award in Macrocyclic Chemistry, the premier international award in supramolecular chemistry.

The award is presented in recognition of his outstanding work on the design and synthesis of molecular motors and other molecular-level machines.  At 43, he is the youngest ever winner of the International Izatt-Christensen Award.

Leigh obtained his BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Sheffield (the latter with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, the 1993 Izatt-Christensen Awardee). After postdoctoral research at the NRC of Canada in Ottawa (1987-1989) he returned to the UK as a Lecturer at UMIST (now part of the University of Manchester). In 1998 he moved to the University of Warwick and in 2001 he took up the Forbes Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh.

 Dr. Leigh's research achievements include the development of high yielding hydrogen bonding and metal template strategies to catenanes and rotaxanes which, in recent years, have enabled the synthesis of increasingly sophisticated and functional molecular motors and other nanomachines. His work also includes the introduction of concepts from statistical physics, such as ratcheting, statistical balance and escapement, into synthetic molecular machine theory and design. 

The award will be conferred at an award ceremony at the 2nd International Symposium on Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry in Salice Terme, Italy, 24-28 June 2007. IBC Advanced Technologies, Inc., of American Fork, Utah, USA, is the sponsor of the award.