8:40 a.m., Dec. 6, 2010----Richard F. Heck, the Willis F. Harrington Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Delaware who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, will join fellow honorees in Oslo and Stockholm for Nobel Week with activities Dec. 7-10.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

The Nobel Laureates will participate in an extensive program of events, including press conferences, receptions, Nobel Lectures, concerts and a royal banquet, according to the Nobel website.

Laureates will receive their Nobel Prizes during awards ceremonies on Friday, Dec. 10. The ceremonies will be webcast live in full at Nobelprize.org beginning at 10:30 a.m. EST. The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry will host a webcast viewing event in Room 101 of Brown Laboratory starting at 10:15 and the campus community is invited to attend.

The Nobel Lectures also will be webcast, with the lectures in physics, chemistry and economic sciences set Wednesday, Dec. 8, beginning at 3 a.m. EST.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced Oct. 6 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Heck was honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside fellow researchers Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, and Ei-Ichi Negishi of Purdue University, “for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis.” They will share a $1.5 million award.

According to the Nobel statement, the scientists were honored for discovering “more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build the complex molecules that are improving our everyday lives.”

Heck was born in Springfield, Mass., on Aug. 15, 1931. He completed both his bachelor of science degree (1952) and his doctorate (1954) at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

After postdoctoral work, he took a position with Hercules in Wilmington, Del., in 1957, and moved to the University of Delaware in 1971, where he remained until his retirement in 1989.

Heck's contributions have previously been recognized by the Wallace H. Carothers Award, bestowed by the Delaware section of the American Chemical Society in 2005, and the American Chemical Society Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods, in 2006.

In other Nobel news, Angel Esteban, who teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at UD, has been invited to take part in a celebration this month in Peru to honor the 2010 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa.