Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 8, 2004|Volume 33, Number 6

Martin Saunders is cited by the
American Chemical Society

The Northeastern section of the American Chemical Society announced that Martin Saunders, professor of chemistry, is the 2005 recipient of the James Flack Norris Award for physical organic chemistry.

The award, established in 1963 to encourage and reward outstanding contributions to physical organic chemistry, will be presented to Saunders at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego, California, in March 2005.

Saunders is being honored for his seminal contributions to the NMR spectroscopy, structures and rearrangements of carbocations, for a new methodology for conformational search, and for the study of fullerenes, containing noble gas atoms.

The Yale chemist created new methods for studying carbocations -- one of the three main species of reactive intermediates in organic reactions including the formation of many natural substances such as steroids.

The approach Saunders took was to create stable solutions of these normally highly reactive species, so that they could be studied by NMR. This allowed him to discover the detailed mechanisms and rates of very rapid rearrangement reactions of the cation intermediates.

Saunders came to Yale as a member of the chemistry faculty in 1955. He has received notable awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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