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We are excited to announce the recipients of the 2024 Akira Suzuki Awards. Congratulations to the 2024 Akira Suzuki Award winner Professor Gregory C. Fu of the California Institute of Technology and the 2024 ICReDD Award winner Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik of the University of Toronto. For more details on this year’s award recipients, please refer to the “Recipients” tab.
The 4th Annual Akira Suzuki Awards Ceremony is scheduled to take place on October 22nd, 2024 in conjunction with the 8th ICReDD International Symposium. Further details about the ceremony and participant registration will be announced via the symposium website.
The Akira Suzuki Awards were established in 2021 by the Akira Suzuki Award Organization Committee in commemoration of Professor Akira Suzuki being awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and to celebrate his 90th birthday. The purpose of the award is to recognize outstanding contributions to research in the discovery of chemical reactions, defined in the broadest sense, and to contribute to the advancement of science and technology.
The two awards, the Akira Suzuki Award and the ICReDD Award, will be bestowed upon a researcher who has achieved remarkable results in the development of chemical reactions in the field of experimental chemistry (Akira Suzuki Award) or the fields of computational (theoretical) chemistry and information science (ICReDD Award). Each award is given to one person each year, regardless of age or nationality.
There will be an award ceremony and an award lecture every year. The winners receive a medal and a monetary prize.
2021 Inaugural Akira Suzuki Award Ceremony
About
Professor Akira Suzuki was born in Hokkaido, Japan, on September 12, 1930.
After graduating from the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science at Hokkaido University in 1954, he completed a master’s degree at the Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University in 1956 and completed his PhD there in 1960.
In 1961, he became an assistant professor at the Department of Synthetic Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering at Hokkaido University. From 1973, he served as a professor at the Department of Applied Chemistry for about 20 years, retiring in 1994 to become a professor emeritus at Hokkaido University.
After his retirement, he served as a professor at Okayama University of Science in 1994 and at Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts from 1995 to 2002.
During this period, he was an invited professor at Purdue University in the U.S. in 2001, and later became an invited professor and professor emeritus at various universities in Japan and abroad, including Hokkaido University.
In 2015, he was awarded the title of University Professor of Hokkaido University, which is given to researchers who have made globally outstanding educational and research achievements and who are recognized as contributing to the advancement of education and research at Hokkaido University over the long term.
For two years from 1963, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in H. C. Brown’s laboratory at Purdue University in the U.S., where he was engaged in research on the synthesis and utilization of organoboron compounds. After returning to Japan, he further developed this field and made many outstanding achievements. In particular, the palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reaction of organoboron compounds reported in 1979 has had a great impact not only on synthetic organic chemistry but also on a wide range of fields such as catalytic chemistry and materials science. The Suzuki coupling reaction, which was the reason he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has made a significant contribution to the development and mass production of products that are familiar to us, such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, liquid crystals essential for IT equipment, and organic light-emitting diodes.
Recipients
2024 Akira Suzuki Award Winners Akira Suzuki Award:
Gregory C. Fu (California Institute of Technology)
Prof. Greg Fu received a B.S. degree in 1985 from MIT, where he worked in the laboratory of Prof. K. Barry Sharpless. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1991 under the guidance of Prof. David A. Evans, Prof. Fu spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech. In 1993, he returned to MIT, where he served as a member of the faculty from 1993–2012. In 2012, he was appointed the Altair Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. Prof. Fu is currently the Norman Chandler Professor of Chemistry at Caltech.
The current research interests of the Fu laboratory include metal-catalyzed coupling reactions and the design of chiral catalysts. In particular, the group is focused on the development of nickel-catalyzed enantioselective cross-couplings of alkyl electrophiles and on photoinduced, copper-catalyzed carbon–heteroatom bond-forming reactions.
Prof. Fu received the Corey Award of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2004, the Mukaiyama Award of the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry of Japan (SSOCJ) in 2006, the Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry of the ACS in 2012, the H. C. Brown Award of the ACS in 2018, and the Noyori Prize of the SSOCJ in 2022. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007) and of the National Academy of Sciences (2014).
ICReDD Award:
Alán Aspuru-Guzik (University of Toronto)
Alán Aspuru-Guzik is a professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto and is also the Canada 150 Research Chair in Theoretical Chemistry and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. He is a CIFAR Lebovic Fellow co-directing the Accelerated Decarbonization program. Alán also holds a Google Industrial Research Chair in Quantum Computing. Alán is the director of the Acceleration Consortium, a University of Toronto-based strategic initiative that aims to gather researchers from industry, government, and academia around pre-competitive research topics related to the lab of the future.
Alán began his independent career at Harvard University in 2006 and was a Full Professor at Harvard University from 2013-2018. He received his B.Sc. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow from 2005-2006.
Alán conducts research in the interfaces of quantum information, machine learning and chemistry. He was a pioneer in the development of algorithms and experimental implementations of quantum computers and quantum simulators dedicated to chemical systems. He has studied the role of quantum coherence in the transfer of excitonic energy in photosynthetic complexes and has accelerated the discovery by calculating organic semiconductors, organic photovoltaic energy, organic batteries and organic light-emitting diodes. He has worked on molecular representations and generative models for the automatic learning of molecular properties. Currently, Alán is interested in automation and “autonomous” chemical laboratories for accelerating scientific discovery.
Among other recognitions, he received the Google Focused Award for Quantum Computing, the Sloan Research Fellowship, The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, and was selected as one of the best innovators under the age of 35 by the MIT Technology Review. He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and received the Early Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. Alán appeared as one of the top 100 most powerful Canadians in 2024 by the Maclean’s Magazine under the AI Category.
Alán is editor-in-chief of the journal Digital Discovery, as well as co-founder of Zapata AI, Kebotix, Intrepid Labs, and Axiomatic AI.
Past Recipients
Akira Suzuki Award:
2023 — Erick M. Carreira (ETH Zürich)
2022 — John F. Hartwig (University of California-Berkeley)
2021 — Stephen L. Buchwald (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
ICReDD Award:
2023 — Frank Neese (Max Planck Institute for Coal Research)
2022 — Kendall N. Houk (University of California-Los Angeles)
2021 — David J. Wales (University of Cambridge)
Organization
The selection of the winners is based on recommendations from the respective Selection Committees, which are composed of domestic and international experts commissioned by the chairman of the Award Organizing Committee. These recommendations are reviewed by the Award Organizing Committee and a final selection is made.
Award Organizing Committee:
Chairman Masaya Sawamura (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Vice Chairman Tetsuya Taketsugu (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Hajime Ito (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Yoshihiro Sato (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Satoshi Maeda (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Tamiki Komatsuzaki (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Akira Suzuki Award Selection Committee:
Timothy F. Jamison (Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Bernhard Breit (Professor, University of Freiburg)
Benjamin List (Professor, Max Planck Institute and Specially Appointed Professor, ICReDD)
Masaya Sawamura (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Hajime Ito (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Yoshihiro Sato (Professor, Hokkaido University)
ICReDD Award Selection Committee:
Michael Rubinstein (Professor, Duke University and Principal Investigator, ICReDD)
Alexandre Varnek (Professor, University of Strasbourg and Principal Investigator, ICReDD)
Hirofumi Sato (Professor, Kyoto University)
Tetsuya Taketsugu (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Satoshi Maeda (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Tamiki Komatsuzaki (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Junya Hasegawa (Professor, Hokkaido University)
Contact
Please direct any inquiries regarding the Akira Suzuki Awards to:
event[at]icredd.hokudai.ac.jp
The Akira Suzuki Awards are funded by the generous sponsorship of the Tosoh Corporation.
