Edinburgh professor awarded for his fundamental contributions to mechanistic analysis of organic reactions, and the resulting practical insights to important synthetic processes Congratulations to Professor Guy Lloyd-Jones, who has been awarded the Arthur C. Cope Later Career Scholars Award. This prestigious late career award (25+ years from PhD) from the American Chemical Society is named after Arthur Cope (1909-1966). Cope was a famous organic chemist at MIT who discovered the Cope elimination and the Cope rearrangement reactions. The Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards were established in 1984 by the American Chemical Society to 'recognize and encourage excellence in organic chemistry'. Eight British chemists have been named as Cope Scholars over the last 37 years, including the late A. Ian Scott FRS, who also held the Forbes Chair of Organic Chemistry at Edinburgh (1980-1984). Lloyd-Jones will deliver a lecture on his research at the Arthur C Cope Symposium in Chicago in August 2022. Prof. Lloyd-Jones graduated in Chemical Technology (BSc, 1989, Huddersfield Polytechnic), studied for his doctorate with John M. Brown FRS (D. Phil, 1992, Oxford), did postdoctoral research with Andreas Pfaltz (1993-1995, Basel), and started his independent career at the University of Bristol in 1996. In 2013 he moved to Edinburgh to take the Forbes Chair of Organic Chemistry. Over the last three decades, the Lloyd-Jones research group has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of the mechanism by which chemical reagents function, and how they fail, shining light into dark corners and bringing new insights to organic chemistry and catalysis. The outcomes of a number of these studies have overturned years of dogma and now feature in undergraduate textbooks. Much of his recent work has been enabled by specialised instruments and equipment that he and his group have designed and built at Edinburgh. His work has been recognized by an honorary doctorate (2015), in 35 prizes, awards, prestigious named lectureships and fellowships in the USA, Canada, Japan, and Europe, and by election to the UK National Academy of Science (FRS, 2013) and the Scottish National Academy (FRSE 2015). It was especially rewarding to find that the citation for the award recognises that the curiosity-driven mechanistic analysis that my research group has so vigorously engaged in over the last 25 years has provided insights that others, especially in industry, have been able to apply to practical advantage. There is a substantial monetary award associated with the Cope Scholarship and I hope to use this to co-fund a new PhD student to join the group in 2022. Professor Guy Lloyd-Jones This article was published on 2024-03-14
