The Swanson School Presents Alumna Donna Blackmond with 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award for Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
PITTSBURGH (March 22, 2017) … Collectively they are professors, researchers and authors; inventors, builders and producers; business leaders, entrepreneurs and industry pioneers. The 53rd annual Distinguished Alumni Banquet brought together honorees from each of the Swanson School of Engineering’s six departments and one overall honoree to represent the entire school. The banquet took place at the University of Pittsburgh's Alumni Hall, and Gerald D. Holder, US Steel Dean of Engineering, presented the awards.
This year’s recipient for the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering was Donna G. Blackmond, PhD, BSCHE ’80, MSCHE ’81, Professor of Chemistry, Scripps Research Institute.
“Many of us here tonight, myself included, remember Donna as an outstanding student and researcher, and have followed her many accomplishments while making a major impact with her research,” said Dean Holder. “She is a pioneer of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis, and her research into prebiotic chemistry and asymmetric catalytic reactions is recognized worldwide.”
About Donna Blackmond
Donna G. Blackmond received BS and MS degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 1980 and 1981, respectively. She received a PhD degree in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. Blackmond started her career as an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh in 1984 and was promoted to associate professor in 1989. She has held professorships in chemical engineering and in organic, physical, and technical chemistry in the US, Germany and the UK, and she has worked in the pharmaceutical industry as an associate director at Merck & Co., Inc. In 2010 she moved from a joint research chair in chemistry and chemical engineering at Imperial College London to her present position as professor of chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
Blackmond’s research focuses on kinetic, mechanistic and reaction engineering studies of organic reactions for pharmaceutical applications, including asymmetric catalysis. She has been invited to give her short course on Kinetics of Organic Catalytic Reactions in academia (including Harvard, Berkeley, Zürich, Nagoya) and at major pharmaceutical companies around the world. Blackmond also carries out fundamental studies probing the origin of the single chirality of biological molecules. She was invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to speak at a Nobel Workshop “On the Origin of Life” in Stockholm (2006). In 2012 she was named a Simons Investigator in the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life.
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Photo Above: Dean Holder (left) with Donna Blackmond and ChemE Department Chair Steven Little.
Contact: Paul Kovach