Stoltz Receives Elias J. Corey Award

Dr. Brian Stoltz (B.S. '93), the Ethel Wilson Bowles & Robert Bowles Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology, has been awarded the Elias J. Corey Award for Outstanding Original Contribution in Organic Synthesis by a Young Investigator.

The Stoltz Group at Caltech is a major source of new strategies for synthesizing complex organic molecules with interesting and useful biological activities. The studies in Brian's group have focused on three conceptual areas:

1. advancing palladium-catalyzd oxidation reactions which don't involve heteroatom transfer
2. developing asymmetric alkylation and protonation technologies to synthesize quaternary & tertiary stereocenters
3. inventing tandem reaction processes

Dr. Stoltz started his career in the Department of Chemistry at IUP under the direction of Dr. John Wood. He received his PhD in organic chemistry at Yale in 1997 and became a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard from 1998-2000 in the group of E.J. Corey (1990 Nobel Laureate, Chemistry). He then moved to Caltech, where he won numerous awards including the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Dr. Stoltz was also presented with a 2006 IUP Alumni Ambassador Award in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

Alumni News - Catie (Gumm) Brewer Awarded NSF Fellowship

Ms. Catie (Gumm) Brewer, a 2007 graduate now in a Ph.D. program at Iowa State University, was recently awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. The fellowship funds up to $121,500 for three years of studying in a graduate research program focusing on science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.

Brewer received her bachelor’s degree at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and today is pursuing her doctorate in chemical and biological engineering at Iowa State.

Brewer, originally from Seattle, plans to use the fellowship to fund her research on the biochar project within the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies.