Award-Winning Chemist To Present Annual Gooch-Stephens Lectures

by LoAna Lopez

Dr. K. Barry Sharpless, a world-renowned scientist with research interests on the borders of chemistry and biology, will present Baylor University's annual Gooch-Stephens Lectures March 22-23 in Room 100 of Marrs McLean Science Building.
The first lecture, titled "Modular Chemistry for Drug Discovery," is intended for the general public and will begin at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 22. The second lecture, "Selective Oxidation of Olefins," is for chemists and will begin at 3 p.m. Friday, March 23.
The W.M. Keck Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, Sharpless discovered and developed many widely-used catalytic oxidation processes. He has received numerous national and international honors, including fellowships from the A.P. Sloan, Camille and Henry Dreyfus, and Guggenheim foundations. He has received the Arthur C. Cope (1992) and Roger Adams (1997) awards from the American Chemical Society, as well as five ACS local sectional awards.
In 1984, Sharpless was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Last year, he received the Chemical Sciences Award of the National Academy of Sciences of which he has been a member since 1985. Among international awards he has received are the Tetrahedron Award, the King Faisal Prize, and the Prelog Medal of the Swiss Federal Institute at Zurich. He also has been awarded five honorary doctorates from American and European universities.
The Gooch-Stephens lecture series is an endowed lecture named for past department chairs, Wilby T. Gooch (also Baylor's first recipient of a master of science degree in chemistry) and William R. Stephens. More than half of these lecturers over the past 25 years have been Nobel Prize winners in chemistry. For more information, call the chemistry and biochemistry department at 710-3311.