We are pleased to celebrate Professor Alison Butler from the University of California, Santa Barbara as the recipient of the 2022 Richard C. Tolman Award. The luncheon will be Saturday, August 5 from 11:00-2:30 PM at the UCSB Faculty Club. The event is sponsored with the California Los Padres Section of the American Chemical Society.
A buffet lunch will be served, followed by a lecture from Dr. Butler.
Speaker: Professor Alison Butler, UCSB Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Title: “Elements of the high seas: The bioinorganic chemistry of the marine environment”
Date & Time: Saturday, August 5, 2023 at 11:00 – 2:30 PM
Place: UCSB Faculty Club (https://www.theclub.ucsb.edu/Visit) (Google Map)
Cost: This event is free.
Registration is now closed, but if you wish to be placed on the waiting list, please use the “contact” link above to do so.
The Tolman Medal is awarded each year by the Southern California Section of the American Chemical Society (https://scalacs.org/) in recognition of outstanding contributions to chemistry. These contributions may include achievements in fundamental studies; achievements in chemical technology; significant contributions to chemical education; or outstanding leadership in science on a national level.
Prof. Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She works on bioinorganic chemistry and metallobiochemistry. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1997), the American Chemical Society (2012), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (2019). She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Prof. Butler earned her Ph.D. at University of California, San Diego in 1982 under Robert G. Linck and Teddy G. Traylor and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Los Angeles with Joan S. Valentine and at California Institute of Technology with Harry B. Gray. She was appointed to the faculty at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1986. Here she was awarded an American Cancer Society Junior Faculty Research Award and also the 34th University of California, Santa Barbara Harold J. Plous Award.
She looks to discover new siderophores, small molecules that bind iron in microorganisms. Using genomics and bioinformatics to predict new siderophore structures, she explores how siderophores adhere to mica and looks at how they can promote surface colonization. She identified that siderophores become sticky when wet, which may help to develop underwater adhesives. Her current research considers the uptake of microbial iron, vanadium haloperoxidases in microbial quorum sensing and cryptic halogenation, bioinspired wet adhesion using catechol compounds, and the oxidative disassembly of lignin. Her research into the bioinorganic chemistry of iron is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
In 2012, she became the President of the Society for Biological Inorganic Chemistry and served until 2014. She was made a Fellow of the American Chemical Society in July 2012 and was delivered the 2016 Douglas Eveleigh Endowed Lecture at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. In 2018, she was awarded the American Chemical Society Alfred Bader Award for her work on siderophores. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the American Chemical Society’s Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award for excellence in organic chemistry, and received the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Inorganic Mechanisms Award. Prof. Butler also received the 2019-2020 Faculty Research Lecturer Award, the highest honor that University of California, Santa Barbara faculty can bestow on their members. She recently received the 2023 ACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry in 2023.