The ACS Division of Organic Chemistry is pleased to announce that the 2022 Paul G. Gassman Distinguished Service Award has been bestowed upon Professor P. Andrew Evans.
Professor P. Andrew Evans is the Alfred R. Bader Chair of Organic Chemistry and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Organic and Organometallic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. He is also a Changjiang Scholar at Central South University in Changsha, Hunan, P. R. China. He received a B.Sc. with honors in Applied Chemistry at Newcastle Polytechnic in 1987 and a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1991 under the supervision of Andrew B. Holmes, FRS. He then completed postdoctoral studies with Philip D. Magnus, FRS, at the University of Texas at Austin as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow. In 1993, he initiated his independent career at the University of Delaware, where he was promoted through the ranks to Professor in 2000. He then moved to Indiana University in 2001 and the University of Liverpool in 2006, where he was the Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry before starting his current position in July 2012.
The Paul G. Gassman Distinguished Service Award has been bestowed upon Professor Evans for his many significant contributions to the Division of Organic Chemistry (DOC) and the organic chemistry community through several prominent elected and appointed roles. For example, as a member of the Division’s Executive Committee, he served as Member-at-Large, Councilor, and Chair. He also organized the successful 2007 National Organic Chemistry Symposium at Duke University. In 2010, with Gary Molander, he initiated the highly acclaimed Graduate Research Symposium, which provides rising fifth-year graduate students an opportunity to interact with leaders from academia, industry, various funding agencies, and publishers. It is now regarded as one of the most innovative and important programs provided by the Division, and it has recently been recognized with an ACS ChemLuminary Award. Professor Evans has also served as a member of several editorial boards for prominent journals and is currently an Associate Editor for the Thieme journal, Synthesis. In addition, he is the current Editor-in-Chief and President of Organic Reactions, a preeminent source of authoritative and comprehensive reviews that also supports several philanthropic initiatives through the Division.
Professor Evans’ research focuses on developing new synthetic transformations that permit the expeditious synthesis of functional molecules. A unique and striking feature of this research program is the ability to access new chemical reactivity through mechanistic studies, which provides the insight to combine these reactions in sophisticated multi-component processes for the stereoselective construction of complex molecular systems. Professor Evans is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and has received numerous awards for his contributions to the field. Recent awards include the Harry and Carol Mosher Award, the Changjiang Scholar Award, an ACS Cope Scholar Award, and the RSC Pedler Award. In addition, several prominent pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, GlaxoWellcome, Eli Lilly, and AstraZeneca, have also recognized his research work through their award programs.