News and Events
Organic Chemistry Professor, Karl J Hale, Awarded Prestigious Japanese Research Fellowship
The QUB School of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering is pleased to announce that Professor Karl J. Hale (Director of SynBiOC) has just been awarded a prestigious Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Invitation Research Fellowship for the year 2010-2011.
JSPS Invitation Research Fellowships are highly prized awards that are conferred on outstanding foreign scientists and scholars who have a sustained excellent record of research achievement at their home University at Professorial level. Only the very top-tier of foreign scientists who are entered for the JSPS Invitation Fellowship Competition by their Japanese host are ultimately successful in winning such a Fellowship. In this regard, in the summer 2010 JSPS Fellowship Competition, in which Professor Hale's nomination was considered, only the top one-third of chemistry nominees were eventually awarded the JSPS Invitation Fellowship by the specialist JSPS Chemistry Selection Committee.
Previous organic chemistry winners of the JSPS Invitation Research Fellowship include eminent chemists such as Larry Overman, Amos B. Smith, Kyriacos C. Nicolaou, Dieter Enders, Leo Paquette, Armin De Meijere, David Cane, John L. Wood, Gary Sulikowski, Jeremy Sanders FRS and Anthony G.M. Barrett FRS, to name but a few. The School is therefore most pleased to have one of its senior research and teaching faculty recognised and honoured in this away by senior chemistry colleagues in Japan.
Professor Hale's JSPS Invitation Fellowship will begin in November 2010 and will involve him doing an extensive three week lecture tour of 16 leading Japanese Research Universities and Pharmaceutical Companies, where he will give lectures on his group's most recent research work, as well as specialist chemistry master-classes on topics such as synthetic carbohydrate chemistry. He will be hosted throughout his visit by Professor Toshiaki Sunazuka of the Kitasato University and Institute in Tokyo, Japan.
This is the second major international research award that has been bestowed on Professor Hale since he came to Queen's in July 2007. Previously, he was awarded the 2007 Liebig Lectureship of the German Chemical Society in August 2007 for his outstanding research contributions to synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry and chemical biology.
Not long after being informed of the Invitation Fellowship Award by the JSPS, Professor Hale commented to colleagues: "It is always a pleasure to have one's past and present chemistry contributions recognised by eminent international researchers in other countries, but when those researchers are making some of the most important advances in modern-day Chemistry, as is the case with many of the chemists in Japan, the delight and honour is even more magnified and meaningful. I am deeply indebted to my future host, Professor Toshiaki Sunazuka, for his generous nomination of me for this prestigious Fellowship Award, and to the JSPS Chemistry Fellowship Committee for their generous bestowal of the Fellowship itself. I am greatly appreciative of this important and high-profile recognition of my group's longstanding research efforts in complex molecule total synthesis and chemical biology, and I am very much looking forward to my forthcoming visit to Japan and to the opportunities it will provide for interacting with some of Japan's very finest chemists".
