Biography

Donna G. Blackmond was born in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. She received her B.S. (1980) and M.S. (1981) degrees in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, and then carried out her PhD thesis at Carnegie Mellon University with James G. Goodwin Jr., which she completed in 1984. She then became an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh in 1984 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1989. In 1992, she switched gears and became Associate Director of Technical Operations at Merck & Company, Inc., Rahway, NJ, where she worked until 1995. She then spent 1 year at the University of Essen, Germany as Professor of Technical Chemistry followed by a 3 year position as Group Leader at the Max-Planck Institut für Kohlenforschung, Mülheim-Ruhr, Germany. In 1999, she took a position as Professor and Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Hull, (UK) until 2004, and then transitioned to Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine as Chair in Catalysis. In 2010, she took a position at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, where she currently resides as Professor of Chemistry.

The research work of Donna Blackmond covers four main areas, including a) reaction progress kinetic analysis, b) mechanistic investigations of catalytic reactions, c) nonlinear effects of catalyst enantiopurity, and d) biological homochirality and amino acid behavior. She has pioneered the development of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA), a methodology that permits rapid determination of concentration dependences of reactants, with the aid of visual/graphical approach in which a critical minimum set of carefully designed experiments permits rapid extraction of kinetic information even as several concentration variables are changing at once. This technique enables deconvolution of rate processes occurring on the catalytic cycle from those occurring off the cycle. More recently, she has expanded the range of models to rationalize the origin of biological homochirality from proposals based purely on chemical reactions to those based on physical phase behavior of chiral molecules as well as a combination of chemical and physical processes.

Donna Blackmond has been the recipient of several awards: Simons Investigator, Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life (2013-2018), US National Academy of Engineering (2013), The Royal Society of Chemistry Physical Organic Chemistry Award (2009), The Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2007-2012), Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, American Chemical Society (2005), Paul Rylander Award of the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society (2003), Royal Society of Chemistry Award in Process Technology (2002), Paul H. Emmett Award in Fundamental Catalysis, North American Catalysis Society (2001), Max-Planck-Society Award for Outstanding Women Scientists (1998), National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1985-90)