In banner ACS year for chemistry department, MacMillan and Chirik receive awards

David MacMillan, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry and a winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in chemistry, has been awarded the prestigious 2027 Arthur C. Cope Award by the American Chemical Society (ACS) in recognition of extraordinary achievement and contributions to the field of catalysis.

The ACS also named Paul Chirik, the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry, as the recipient of the 2027 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry.

The Cope Award is one of the highest international honors in organic chemistry, considered a career award that focuses on lifelong achievement rather than one specific technology. Cope award recipients are also largely determined by peers, reflecting an individual’s high standing among colleagues and other experts in the field. (It is distinguished from the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards, 10 of which are given out each year to encourage excellence in the field; MacMillan won a Cope Scholar Award in 2007.)

“I feel incredibly privileged and incredibly humbled. It’s another of those moments in life,” said MacMillan. “Coming up as an organic chemist, I would see Cope Award winners and think, these are like gods of the organic chemist world. So when the ACS president called me up to tell me I had won it, it was really surreal,” he said.

“This is also an award for my group’s research that represents the creativity, dedication and innovation of all the members of my lab past and present,” said MacMillan. “It’s really their award, to be honest.” 

MacMillan’s contributions to the field of catalysis have had a worldwide impact, including the technology for which he was jointly awarded the 2021 Nobel in chemistry, asymmetric organocatalysis, a revolutionary means of designing and building small organic molecules to drive chemical reactions more selectively and in a more environmentally benign fashion; and advancements in photoredox catalysis, a powerful strategy for the activation of small molecules that uses visible light to drive reactions. 

The ACS announced the awards on Aug. 31 in its flagship journal, Chemical and Engineering News. The Cope Award consists of $25,000 and a medallion along with an unrestricted grant in the amount of $150,000 for research in organic chemistry. It was created in celebration of the life and chemical contributions of Arthur C. Cope, a highly influential chemist and former president of the ACS.

MacMillan was born in Bellshill, Scotland, in 1968, and received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Glasgow in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the University of California-Irvine in 1996.

He began his independent research career as a member of the chemistry faculty at the University of California-Berkeley, in July 1998. He joined the chemistry department at Caltech in 2000. He came to Princeton in 2006 and was named the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry in 2011. He served as chair of the Department of Chemistry from 2010 to 2015.

He has won numerous prizes and awards, including most recently an honorary fellowship in the Royal Society of Chemistry (2026), and the F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research (2024). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, and in 2022 was knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Chirik’s ‘exceptional honor’ 

The ACS recognized Chirik for his research in earth-abundant metal catalysis and his group’s mission to understand how the chemistry of iron, cobalt and nickel can be controlled to promote important reactions in catalysis. This research feeds a host of applications ranging from drug discovery and synthesis to chemically recyclable plastic to new carbon-neutral fuels.

Chirik is a leading expert in the application of catalysis to challenges in sustainable chemistry. He called the award an “exceptional honor” for his lab.

“I have been studying organometallic chemistry since my freshman year as an undergraduate and have continued in the field throughout graduate school and my 25-year independent career,” said Chirik, who is also the chair of the Department of Chemistry. “To be honored by the ACS for our work in earth-abundant metal catalysis is an important recognition for all of the hard work that my students and postdocs have done over the years." 

Chirik received his B.S. in chemistry from Virginia Tech, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1995. He earned his Ph.D. under John Bercaw at Caltech in 2000. He did his postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and joined the faculty at Cornell University in 2001 before coming to Princeton in 2011.

Chirik won the Linus Pauling Medal in Chemistry in 2021; the Rylander Award in Catalysis in 2020; and the Gabor Somorjai Award for Creative Research in Catalysis in 2021. He also received one of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s first exploration-phase grants for research in green chemistry in 2022, and was named a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science that same year.