It has been decided that Professor Hisashi Yamamoto of Chubu University will receive the "Roger Adams Award".The award is considered to be the most prestigious in the organic chemistry world and is selected by the American Chemistry Society every other year.This is the second Japanese person after Ryoji Noyori, a special professor at Nagoya University, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001. Since the establishment of the award in 1959, it is the 30th person in the world and 11 of the award winners have won the Nobel Prize.The award ceremony will be held in San Francisco, USA next April.
Organic compounds are compounds containing carbon, and some isomers (enantiomers) having different three-dimensional structures such as the right hand and the left hand exist, and they may be toxic only by the difference in structure.A catalyst is needed to make this separately (asymmetric synthesis), but Professor Yamamoto proposed a catalyst called "chiral Lewis acid catalyst", which has an excellent asymmetric synthesis function, ahead of the rest of the world in the early 1980s.Demonstrating its usefulness, we pioneered a new field called "molecular acid catalyst".
After that, we succeeded in creating a new generation of catalysts such as a composite acid catalyst that combines Lewis acid and Bronsted acid, which provides even higher selectivity.It has become the source of molecular acid catalysts currently used all over the world. In the 21st century, we developed research into strongly acidic Bronsted acid catalysts (super Bronsted acid catalysts) that do not contain harmful metals, and despite the extremely low impact on the environment, we only required organic substances. We have also succeeded in a synthetic method that can be produced with low resources.
Professor Yamamoto is now 73 years old.After graduating from the Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University, completed the doctoral course at Harvard University Graduate School in the United States.After working as a professor at Nagoya University and the University of Chicago, he is currently a professor at Chubu University, a director of the Molecular Catalyst Research Center of the same university, and a director of the Institute of Comprehensive Engineering.This year, he became the president of the Chemical Society of Japan.
Note: The acid catalyst uses Lewis acid (a substance that receives electrons) and Bronsted acid (a substance that gives hydrogen ions [protons]).Molecular acid catalysts are artificially modified to improve their applicability.
