Fraser Stoddart

In 2016, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage for the design and synthesis of molecular machines. In 2017, Stoddart was appointed a part-time position at the University of New South Wales to establish his New Chemistry initiative at the UNSW School of Chemistry. In 2019, Sir Fraser Stoddart introduced a premium skin care brand called "Noble Panacea", which utilizes aspects of his work.

The Fraser and Norma Stoddart Prize for PhD students has been established at their alma mater, the University of Edinburgh. It was given for the first time in 2013.

In 2008, he established the Mechanostereochemistry Group and was named Board of Trustees Professor in Chemistry at Northwestern University.

As of 2016 Stoddart has an h-index of 130. He has published more than 1000 publications and holds at least ten patents. For the period from January 1997 to 31 August 2007, he was ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information as the third most cited chemist with a total of 14,038 citations from 304 papers at a frequency of 46.2 citations per paper.

Stoddart was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the New Year's Honours December 2006, by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2007, he received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in recognition for his outstanding and pioneering work in molecular recognition and self-assembly, and the introduction of quick and efficient template-directed synthetic routes to mechanically interlocked molecular compounds, which have changed the way chemists think about molecular switches and machines.

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) predicted that Fraser Stoddart was a likely laureate of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with George M. Whitesides and Seiji Shinkai for their contributions to molecular self-assembly. However, the Prize eventually went to Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon.

In July 2002, he became the Acting Co-Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). In May 2003, he became the Fred Kavli Chair of NanoSystems Sciences and served from then through August 2007 as the Director of the CNSI.

He was awarded a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1980 for his research into stereochemistry beyond the molecule. In 1990, he moved to the Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Birmingham and was Head of the School of Chemistry there (1993–97) before moving to UCLA as the Saul Winstein Professor of Chemistry in 1997, succeeding Nobel laureate Donald Cram.

Stoddart's papers and other material are instantly recognizable due to a distinctive "cartoon"-style of representation he has developed since the late 1980s. A solid circle is often placed in the middle of the aromatic rings of the molecular structures he has reported, and different colors to highlight different parts of the molecules. Indeed, he was one of the first researchers to make extensive use of color in chemistry publications. The different colors usually correspond to the different parts of a cartoon representation of the molecule, but are also used to represent specific molecular properties (blue, for example, is used to represent electron-poor recognition units while red is used to represent the corresponding electron-rich recognition units). The distinctive coloring has led to coining the term 'little blue box' for cyclophane, an important π-acceptor used to synthesize mechanically bonded structures. Stoddart maintains this standardized color scheme across all of his publications and presentations, and his style has been adopted by other researchers reporting mechanically interlocked molecules based on his syntheses.

Stoddart is an American and British citizen. Stoddart married Norma Agnes Scholan, in 1968 until her death in 2004 from cancer and has two daughters. Norma Stoddart obtained a PhD in biochemistry and helped support the research efforts of her husband at the Universities of Sheffield, Birmingham, and California, Los Angeles.

In 1967, he went to Queen's University (Canada) as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, and then, in 1970, to the University of Sheffield as an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Research Fellow, before joining the academic staff as a lecturer in chemistry. In 1978, he was transferred to the ICI Corporate Laboratory where he first started investigating the mechanically interlocked molecules that would eventually become molecular machines. He was a Science Research Council Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978. After spending a sabbatical (1978–81) at the ICI Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn, England, he returned to Sheffield where he was promoted to a Readership in 1982.

Sir James Fraser Stoddart FRS FRSE HonFRSC (born 24 May 1942) is a British-American chemist who is Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States. He works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. Stoddart has developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilising molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He has demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches. His group has even applied these structures in the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). His efforts have been recognized by numerous awards including the 2007 King Faisal International Prize in Science. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 2016 for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.

Fraser Stoddart was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 24 May 1942. He was brought up as a tenant farmer on Edgelaw Farm, a small community consisting of three families, and received early schooling at the local village school in Carrington, Midlothian, before going on to Melville College in Edinburgh. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1964 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in 1967 from the University of Edinburgh the latter for research on natural gums in Acacias supervised by Edmund Langley Hirst and D M W Anderson.