Awarded: June, 7th 2024
Proposed by: IQS School of Engineering-URL
Born in 1968 in the working-class town of Bellshill, Scotland, David W. MacMillan studied chemistry at the University of Glasgow, where he worked with Dr. Ernie Colvin. In 1990 he began doctoral studies with Professor Larry Overman at the University of California, Irvine. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor David Evans at Harvard University in 1996. Subsequently, he began his independent career at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998 before moving in 2000 to Caltech to hold the Erale C. Anthony Chair in Organic Chemistry. In 2006, he moved as A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Chemistry to Princeton University, where he continues his scientific and academic activities. During the period 2010-2015, he served as head of the Department of Chemistry at the same university. He is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry.
In 2021 he was awarded - together with Benjamin List (Institut Max Planck, Mülheim an der Ruhr) - the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of the area of asymmetric organocatalysis”.
MacMillan is one of the world leaders in the area of Methodological Synthetic Chemistry and his research is focused on the discovery and fine-tuning of new chemical reactions for bond formation in a more efficient, selective and sustainable way. MacMillan and his team have spent an enormous amount of effort throughout his career searching for new catalytic concepts - a key area for these bond-forming reactions - and new ways to apply them to the total synthesis of natural products and pharmacologically active compounds. With this research, they have succeeded in providing the scientific community with a unique arsenal of chemical tools.