Merck Award 2009 winner

David Leigh
University of Edinburgh

Awarded for his contributions to directed and templated reactions in organic supramolecular chemistry and the design and synthesis of molecular motors.

About the winner

David Leigh obtained his PhD in supramolecular organic chemistry with Sir J Fraser Stoddart at the University of Sheffield in 1987. After postdoctoral research with carbohydrate chemist David Bundle at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, David returned to the UK as a Lecturer at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1989.

In 1998 he moved to the University of Warwick as Professor of Synthetic Chemistry and in 2001 he moved again to take up the Forbes Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh.

Leigh's research interests include the development of new methods for the synthesis of catenanes and rotaxanes and experimental synthetic molecular machine design.

He has won a number of major international awards including the 2007 Izatt-Christensen Award for Macrocyclic Chemistry, 2007 Descartes Prize and the 2007 Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2009.