Award Recognizing Excellence in Organic Chemistry

Olafs Daugulis, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Houston, is one of 10 scientists receiving the American Chemical Society (ACS) Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award for 2014. The award recognizes and encourages excellence in organic chemistry.

Cope Scholar Awards, sponsored by the Arthur C. Cope Fund, include a $5,000 award, a certificate, and a $40,000 unrestricted research grant. The citation for Daugulis’ award reads:

“For the development of transition metal-catalyzed carbon–hydrogen bond functionalization reactions and their practical applications in organic synthesis.”

The award recipients will be recognized in August at the Arthur C. Cope Symposium held during the Fall ACS National Meeting in San Francisco. Each recipient will give an address at the symposium; Daugulis’ presentation is titled “Regioselective Functionalization of Unreactive C-H Bonds.”

“The Cope Scholar Award is the fifth major national/international award Olafs has won,” said David Hoffman, UH chemistry department chair. “We’re proud to have him as a member of our faculty and to have his excellent work recognized by the American Chemical Society.”

Previously, Daugulis received an NSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research. He also won a UH Teaching Award in 2010.

Other Cope Scholars named for 2014 are Richard N. Armstrong, Vanderbilt University; Abigail G. Doyle, Princeton University; Raymond L. Funk, Pennsylvania State University; Seth Herzon, Yale University; Jeffrey N. Johnston, Vanderbilt; Gary E. Keck, University of Utah; Benjamin List, Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, Germany; Hung-wen (Ben) Liu, University of Texas, Austin; and Tomislav Rovis, Colorado State University.

- Kathy Major, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics