Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis — 2022 Winner Professor Chi-Huey Wong Announced!
Elsevier and the Board of Executive Editors of Elsevier's Tetrahedron journal series are pleased to announce that the 2022 Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis has been awarded to Professor Chi-Huey Wong, Scripps Family Chair Professor of Chemistry at Scripps Research and Distinguished Professor at Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica.
Professor Wong is best known for his work on chemo-enzymatic and programmable synthesis of oligosaccharides and glycoproteins, elucidation of glycosylation effect on protein folding and function, and development of glycan microarrays, universal vaccines and homogeneous antibodies against influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and cancer.
Professor Wong said "I am deeply honored to receive the Tetrahedron Prize this year. It is a recognition of our long-time research in the field of glycoscience. I am most grateful to the coworkers and collaborators for their contributions to make this recognition possible, also to Scripps Research, Academia Sinica, and the organizations that support our research, and to the nominator and the selection committee for giving me this honor. Over the years, my laboratory has been actively involved in the development of new tools and methods for studying carbohydrates and glycosylation in biology and developing new strategies to combat major diseases associated with carbohydrate recognition. This prize is particularly meaningful to me as I had a wonderful experience with the Tetrahedron Publications when serving as editor-in-chief of BMC and as Chairman of the Board of Editors years ago."
About Professor Wong
Professor Chi-Huey Wong received his B.S. (1970) and M.S. (1977) in biochemical sciences (with KT Wang) from National Taiwan University, and Ph.D. (1982) in Chemistry (with George M. Whitesides) from MIT. After one year of postdoctoral research at Harvard University (with Whitesides), he became an assistant professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University (1983) and promoted to full professor in 1987. He then moved to The Scripps Research Institute in 1989 as Professor and Ernest W. Hahn Chair in Chemistry, and from 2006 to 2016, he served as President of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He is currently the Scripps Family Chair Professor of Chemistry at Scripps Research and holding a joint appointment as Distinguished Professor at Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica.
He has received many honors in recognition of his contributions, including most recently The Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry (2021). In addition, he served as editorial advisor for several journals in chemical sciences, as scientific advisor for many organizations, as editor-in-chief of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, Head of the Frontier Research Program on Glycotechnology at RIKEN in Japan, Chief Science Advisor for Taiwan Government, and President of Institute for Biotechnology and Medicine Industry, Taiwan (IBMI).
Other current medicinal chemistry research in his group includes inactivators of ornithine aminotransferase, in preclinical efficacy and toxicological studies for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma; selective inhibitors of neuronal nitric oxide synthase in preclinical studies for cerebral palsy and other neurodegenerative diseases as well as for melanoma; inhibitors of bacterial nitric oxide synthase being tested as a combination treatment with antibiotics resistant to bacterial infections.
He is an elected member of Academia Sinica, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, the European Molecular Organization, and the US National Academy of Inventors.
He trained over five hundred graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, published over 750 papers, and received more than one hundred issued patents. For more information about his research, please visit the website www.scripps.edu/wong.
