Merck Award 2011 Winner

Awarded for his remarkable, recent contributions to organic chemistry in the areas of stereochemistry, conformational control, and organolithium chemistry.

About the Winner

Jonathan Clayden was born in Uganda in 1968, grew up in Essex, and was an undergraduate at Churchill College, Cambridge.  In 1992 he completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge with Dr Stuart Warren.  After postdoctoral work with Professor Marc Julia at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he moved in 1994 to Manchester as a lecturer.  In 2001 he was promoted to a chair in organic chemistry.  

He has published over 180 papers, and his research interests encompass various areas of synthesis and stereochemistry, particularly where conformation has a role to play: asymmetric synthesis, atropisomerism, organolithium chemistry, and long-range stereocontrol. He has uncovered new classes of atropisomers, developed new methods for their synthesis, and invented new ways to use aromatic rings as precursors to non-aromatic biologically active compounds, most recently the Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning toxins (-)-Isodomoic Acid B, E and F.  He recently demonstrated that stereochemical information may be relayed over multi-nanometre distances. He is a co-author of the widely used textbook "Organic Chemistry", the second edition of which is about to be published by OUP, and his book "Organolithiums: Selectivity for Synthesis" was published by Pergamon in 2002.  

He has received the Royal Society of Chemistry's Meldola (1997) and Corday Morgan (2003) medals, Stereochemistry Prize (2005) and Hickinbottom Fellowship (2006), and the Novartis Young European Investigator Award (2004). He held senior research fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society in 2003-4 and 2009-10.