Fraser Stoddart

President Barack Obama greets the 2016 American Nobel Prize winners in the Oval Office, 30 November 2016, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart (2nd right), Laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Crystal structure of a rotaxane with a cyclobis(paraquat-p-phenylene) macrocycle reported by Stoddart and coworkers in the Eur. J. Org. Chem. 1998, 2565–2571. Crystal structure of a catenane with a cyclobis(paraquat-p-phenylene) macrocycle reported by Stoddart and coworkers in the Chem. Commun., 1991, 634–639. Crystal structure of molecular Borromean rings reported by Stoddart and coworkers Science 2004, 304, 1308–1312.

Sir James Fraser Stoddart, FRS FRSE HonFRSC (24 May 1942 – 30 December 2024) was a British-American chemist who was Chair Professor in Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. He was the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States. He worked in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. Stoddart developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilising molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches. His group has even applied these structures in the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). His efforts were recognized by numerous awards, including the 2007 King Faisal International Prize in Science. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 2016 for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.