Donna G Blackmond received a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University. She has held professorships in chemistry and in chemical engineering in the US, Germany, and the UK, and she has worked in the pharmaceutical industry at Merck & Co., Inc. She is presently Professor of Chemistry and Department Chair at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. She holds joint US/UK citizenship.
Prof. Blackmond has been recognized internationally for her research including awards from the Royal Society, Max-Planck-Gesllechaft and the American Chemical Society. She is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been a Woodward Visiting Scholar at Harvard, a Miller Institute Research Fellow at Berkeley, an NSF Visiting Professor at Princeton, and the Givaudan-Karrer Lecturer at University of Zürich. Prof. Blackmond’s research focuses on mechanistic studies of reactions for pharmaceutical applications, including asymmetric catalysis.