Events
The Sun Hung Kai Properties Nobel Laureates Distinguished Lectures by Professor Ei-ichi Negishi, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry on"Pursuit of My Dreams for Half-a-Century" (in English)
21 Nov 2011
5:00 pm
Sir Run Run Shaw Hall, CUHK
Professor Ei-ichi Negishi, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Ei-ichi Negishi, H. C. Brown Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Purdue University, grew up in Japan and received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Tokyo in 1958. After he obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963, he joined Professor H. C. Brown's Laboratories at Purdue as a Postdoctoral Associate in 1966 and was appointed Assistant to Professor Brown in 1968. Negishi went to Syracuse University as Assistant Professor in 1972 and began his life-long investigations of transition metal-catalyzed organometallic reactions for organic synthesis. He was promoted to Associate Professor at Syracuse University in 1976 and invited back to Purdue University as Full Professor in1979. In 1999 he was appointed the inaugural H. C. Brown Distinguished Professor of Chemistry.
Professor Negishi has received various awards, with the most representative being the 1996 Chemical Society of Japan Award, the 1998 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry, 1998–2001 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Researcher Award, Germany, 2000 Sir Edward Frankland Prize, Royal Society of Chemistry, UK, the 2007 Yamada-Koga Prize, Japan, the 2010 ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, 2010 Japanese Order of Culture, and the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Communications and Public Relations Office
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Topic: Pursuit of My Dreams for Half-a-Century
The statistical odds of winning a Nobel Prize may be estimated to be 1/10,000,000 or 1/107. One way of looking at this infinitesimally small figure is to think of it as winning “one-in-ten” competitions seven times in a row. For example, as one of the top few in a class of a few hundred students, you may already be 1/102 or so. Your competition level must continuously move up. After winning the fifth- or sixth-level competition, you may already be vying for a Nobel Prize or something equivalent to it in some other area. In this lecture, I shall reminisce how I might have climbed up seven steps of increasingly challenging competitions over 75 years to be finally recognized with a 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
