Aug 22, 2017 | Professor Heather Maynard is one of ten organic chemists to be selected for the American Chemical Society (ACS) Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award

CNSI | August 22, 2017

Along with 9 other award recipients, Dr. Maynard will receive the Arthur C. Cope Scholars Award in August 2018 at the fall ACS national meeting in Boston where she will deliver an award address.

The award is sponsored by the Arthur C. Cope Fund to recognize outstanding achievement in the field of organic chemistry, and was established in 1984 by the ACS Board of Directors, on recommendation of the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry, under the terms of the will of Arthur C. Cope.

Dr. Maynard is a Professor of organic chemistry at UCLA, Director of the Chemistry Biology Interface Training Program, and Associate Director of Technology and Development at the California Nanosystems Institute. She has been selected as an Outstanding Emerging Investigator by the Journal of Materials Chemistry and has received the Amgen New Faculty Award, Seaborg Award, NSF Career Award, Seaborg Award for Outstanding Research, the Hanson-Dow Award for Excellence in Teaching, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Herbert Newby Award for Outstanding Research at UCLA. Maynard is an ACS POLY, ACS PMSE, Leverhulme, Kavli Frontiers, and Royal Society of Chemistry Fellow, was a Fulbright Specialist in New Zealand in 2017, and is currently a member of the US Defense Science Study Group.

Her current work lies at the frontiers of chemistry, biomaterials, biotechnology, and nanotechnology and involves an exciting combination of organic and polymer synthesis, materials characterization and biomedical application. Her research group is applying polymers to therapeutic delivery of proteins to treat important diseases such as diabetes, chronic wounds and cancer. In addition, a part of the group is working on polymers for agricultural applications to meet the urgent need to feed the growing global population. As a result, Maynard group members make important contributions to a variety of fields and learn a combination of skills that sets them apart favorably in the job market.

Other UCLA chemistry and biochemistry faculty who have received the Arthur C. Cope Scholar award are Kendall N. Houk (1988), Fred Wudl (1993), Christopher S. Foote (1994), Michael E. Jung (1995), J. Fraser Stoddart (1999), Yi Tang (2012) and Miguel García-Garibay and Neil Garg (2015).