Professor Sir Fraser Stoddart's contributions to the field of chemistry and his impact on all who knew him are profound. He was a venerated chemist and a Nobel Laureate who served as a Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University for 16 years before joining HKU in 2023.
Professor Stoddart's pioneering research revolutionised the ways in which molecular entities come together. Other than by a typical chemical bond, they can be associated, threaded and locked geometrically, by “a mechanical bond”, a term that he coined. His ground-breaking work on the applications of this concept led to the fabrication of artificial molecular machinery, like molecular pumps and electric molecular motors, spanning the fields of synthetic chemistry, materials science, and nanotechnology.
In recognition of his extraordinary achievements, Professor Stoddart was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as well as numerous other accolades. He was knighted in 2007 for his services to chemistry, and he was named a Highly Cited Researcher for 11 consecutive years. He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, the Royal Society of London, UK, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
As a strong advocate of science and its openness and inclusivity, he has said on many occasions, that “Science is global; science knows no boundaries.” He has held positions as the Dean of the Stoddart Institute of Molecular Science at Zhejiang University and as a Visiting Professor of Chemistry at both Northwestern University and the University of New South Wales. He was a champion for the ACS Project Seed that sponsored research opportunities for economically disadvantaged high school students.
His enjoyment and hard work in pure research have also been inspiring. He had said that he has been immensely privileged to have been able to practise his hobby almost every day of his life. A mirror-image cyclodextrin--a sugar macrocycle, synthesized at HKU and published in Nature Synthesis last year, was voted as one of the Molecules of the Year 2024.
Personally he touched the lives of many scientists through his interactions with them, and the level of support he extended to his research collaborators and students were second to none. He has trained more than 500 PhD students from all over the world.