Chinese-American chemist Jin-Quan Yu, who graduated from ECNU about 30 years ago, has won a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes called a genius grant.
Yu, who is a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), will receive a US$625,000 fellowship over five years from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The grant comes with no specific obligations or reporting requirements. He was one of 23 American elites from a wide range of fields who were given the honor on September 22.
A synthetic chemist pioneering new techniques for the functionalization of carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds, the 50-year-old Yu was awarded for inventing a new method that breaks down barriers to the development of versatile compounds with enormous benefits to academic, industrial, and pharmaceutical research.
Born on January 10, 1968, Yu received a bachelor’s degree from ECNU in 1987, a master’s degree from Guangzhou Institute of Chemistry, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1999.
He was a research fellow (1998-2002) and junior faculty member (2003-2004) at the University of Cambridge, postdoctoral fellow (2001-2002) at Harvard University, and assistant professor of chemistry (2004-2007) at Brandeis University, prior to joining
the TSRI faculty in 2007. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Chemistry, Yu is the recipient of many awards and honors.
His work in the field of organic synthesis focuses on the development of new strategies and tools to accelerate catalytic C-H activation reactions.
Set up by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1981, the MacArthur Fellowship is a US$625,000, no-strings-attached grant for US citizens or residents who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more.
Individuals cannot apply for the award; they must be nominated. Typically, 20 to 30 fellows from a wide variety of fields are selected each year. So far, more than 900 have become recipients of the award, including Xiaowei Zhuang, a Chinese-American biophysicist (2003); chemist Phil S. Baran (2013); and Chinese-born American chemist Yang Peidong (2015).
The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is one of the world’s largest independent, not-for-profit organizations focusing on research in the biomedical sciences, internationally recognized for its contributions to science and health.
