Caltech’s Sarah Reisman Wins 2019 FRED Award
Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) announces that Sarah E. Reisman, professor of chemistry, Division of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, has been selected as the 2019 recipient of the foundation’s Cottrell Frontiers in Research Excellence and Discovery (FRED) Award, one of the suite of Cottrell Plus awards.
“Cottrell FRED awards have a dual purpose,” said RCSA President and CEO Dan Linzer. “While they reward creative Cottrell Scholars with vibrant programs of research, they point to the future by providing funds to initiate high-risk/high-reward projects that will potentially transform a research area.”
RCSA’s Cottrell Scholar program champions the very best early career teacher-scholars in chemistry, physics and astronomy by providing significant discretionary awards for research. Nurturing an interdisciplinary community of outstanding scientific/academic leaders, the CS program fosters synergy among faculty at major American research universities and primarily undergraduate institutions. Post-tenure Cottrell Scholars may compete for the prestigious Cottrell FRED Award supporting early stage, potentially transformative research.
Reisman, a 2012 Cottrell Scholar, is being recognized with the $250,000 award for her pioneering efforts to advance new methods to optimize catalytic reactions. Her research proposal calls for using the emerging concept of “input design machine learning” (an approach to artificial intelligence) to develop new chemical reactions that can be catalyzed by metals, in particular by nickel. Despite the success of Reisman’s past research to develop novel nickel-catalyzed reactions that are highly specific, those efforts were extremely time- and labor-intensive because they involved repeated rounds of testing of all the conditions for each reaction. Her goal is to develop a computational tool that dramatically accelerates the rate of discovery and optimization of new nickel catalysts.
Referees of Reisman’s proposal were highly impressed, and pointed out the very broad impact the project could have on how chemists identify possible catalysts and conditions for important reactions. That knowledge would enable chemists to develop approaches to synthesize compounds that would otherwise be very difficult to obtain, especially complex, biologically active natural products. One result would be the more rapid, and less costly, transition from discovery of new compounds to clinical use for the treatment of disease.
In addition to RCSA’s Cottrell Scholar Award (a requirement for FRED Award eligibility), Reisman has previously received the American Chemical Society Cope Scholar Award, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator award, the Eli Lilly Grantee award, and, in 2019, both the OMCOS award and the Margaret Faul Women in Chemistry Award. Reisman has served the broader scientific community as a permanent member on a National Institutes of Health study section, as an Editor of Organic Syntheses, and as an Associate Editor for the American Chemical Society publication, Organic Letters.
“Cottrell FRED recipients are highly creative Cottrell Scholars whose ideas and potential solutions address major current challenges in their areas of research expertise,” notes RCSA Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco. “By developing unique perspectives for solving key research challenges, Cottrell FRED awardees create new approaches that accelerate basic science research for the benefit of society. Sarah Reisman certainly fits that description. We are proud to name her the 2019 FRED Award winner.”
