Donna Blackmond to speak at the 2012 WISE Conference in February.

Donna Blackmond
Reflections on an Asymmetric Career Path Donna G Blackmond was born April 19, 1958 in Pittsburgh, PA. She received a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984. She is currently Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, and has held professorships in chemistry and in chemical engineering in the US, Germany, and the UK. She has also worked in industrial research in the pharmaceutical industry. Prof. Blackmond has been a Woodward Visiting Scholar at Harvard University (2002-2003) and a Miller Institute Research Fellow at University of California, Berkeley (2003). She received the 2009 Royal Society of Chemistry Award in Physical Organic Chemistry, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007, and an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in 2005 from the Organic Chemistry Division of ACS. She was an invited lecturer to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Nobel Workshop "On the Origin of Life" in 2006. Prof Blackmond's research focuses on kinetic and mechanistic studies of asymmetric catalytic reactions for pharmaceutical applications as well as on fundamental investigations of the origin of biological homochirality. Dr. Blackmond will follow her career since finishing her PhD in Chemical Engineering in 1984, through positions in academia and industry, in four countries on two continents, in chemical engineering, physical chemistry, organic chemistry, and technical chemistry. These "reflections" will provide the starting point for a general discussion of the rhyme and reason of career choices.