Professor Carolyn Bertozzi to Receive 2024 Priestley Medal at ACS Spring 2024

Professor Carolyn Bertozzi will receive the 2024 Priestley Medal at the ACS Spring 2024 National Meeting & Exposition in New Orleans. The medal is the highest honor awarded by ACS and annually recognizes an individual for distinguished services to chemistry.

Professor Bertozzi receives the award “for pioneering research in bioorthogonal reactions and their applications in studying living organisms and developing therapeutics, and for mentoring a generation of outstanding chemists.”

A talented and accomplished chemist, and the Editor-in-Chief of ACS Central Science, Bertozzi has received dozens of awards and honors, including the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which she shared with Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless.

Through her ingenious and prolific research, Bertozzi created the field of biorthogonal reactions, which opened the doors to studying disease at the molecular level. This breakthrough has allowed for chemical manipulations inside of living cells without disrupting their operations, thus promoting more effective means of developing chemical tools to address diseases like cancer, inflammation, tuberculosis, and viral infections such as COVID-19.