Dr. Fraser Stoddart, an internationally renowed chemist is UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences and director of California Nano Systems Institute (CNSI). Professor Stoddart has published over 600 scientific papers and is currently one of the 100 most highly cited chemists according to the Institute for Scientific Information. His current research interests relate to the development of molecular recognition-cum-self-assembly processes and template-directed protocols in noncovalent and covalent synthesis, respectively, for the construction of artificial molecular machines and the fabrication of molecular electronic devices on the nanoscale level. This work was highlighted in Science (2001, 294, 2442) as the "Breakthrough of the Year." His work has been recognized by many awards, including a Humboldt Fellowship (1998) and a Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society (1999). He is currently on the advisory boards of numerous journals including Angewandte Chemie, Chemistry - A European Journal, Organic Letters, and the Journal of Organic Chemistry. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London in 1994 and to the Fellowship of the Germany Academy of Natural Sciences, the Leopoldina, in 1999. In December 2001, he was one of 15 luminaries in the world of chemistry to join Seven Nobel Prize winners in Stockholm at a Nobel Jubilee Symposium on the "Frontiers of Molecular Sciences."

Dr. Stoddart was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 24, 1942. He received his BSc (1964) and PhD (1966) degrees from Edinburgh University and pursued postdoctoral studies at Queen's University (1967-69) in Canada and at Sheffield University (1970) in England. He was appointed a Lecturer in Chemistry at Sheffield University in 1970 and promoted to a Readership in 1981 after spending a sabbatical period (1978-81) at the ICI Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn. In 1990, he moved to the Chair of Organic Chemistry at Birmingham and was Head of the School of Chemistry there (1993-97) before moving to the University of California at Los Angeles in 1997.

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