November 13, 2003

Marks receives international honors

Tobin J. Marks, the Vladimir N. Ipatieff Professor of Catalytic Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has received two of the most prestigious international awards in the field of organometallic chemistry.

Tobin J. Marks

He has been awarded the Sir Edward Frankland Prize of the British Royal Society of Chemistry, the highest award of the society for accomplishments in organometallic chemistry research, and the Karl Ziegler Prize of the Gasellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (Germany), the highest award of the German Chemical Society for organometallic chemistry research. He is the first American to receive the $60,000 Ziegler Prize.

This is the third major international honor in organometallic chemistry awarded to Marks. He received the 2001 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in the Chemistry of Materials in recognition of his work in polymeric materials, organometallic, inorganic and materials chemistry. 

Marks last year was awarded the American Institute of Chemists (AIC) 2002 Gold Medal. Several previous winners of the medal have been Nobel Laureates.

He also is the recipient of the American Chemical Society Chicago Section’s 2001 Josiah Willard Gibbs Medal, regarded by many as the highest award given to chemists next to the Nobel Prize. 

Marks’ other honors include the 2001 Linus Pauling Medal, awarded by the American Chemical Society (ACS) Sections of the Pacific Northwest. This award recognizes outstanding achievement in chemistry comparable to that of its namesake and first winner, Linus Pauling, who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Since the first medal was awarded in 1966 to Pauling, approximately one-quarter of the winners have been or have become Nobel Laureates.

Among his other honors are the 2000 F. A. Cotton Medal of the American Chemical Society’s Texas A&M Section and the Texas A&M University chemistry department, for his “masterful and varied contributions to inorganic and organometallic chemistry,” and the 1999 Paolo Chini Award of the Italian Chemical Society. 

Marks’ research focuses on the design, synthesis and in-depth characterization of new substances having important chemical, physical and/or biological properties. His work is credited with having major impact on contemporary catalysis with seminal research in the areas of organo-f-element homogeneous catalysis, metal-ligand bonding energetics, supported organometallic catalysis, and metallocene polymerization catalysis. 

He has been a leader in the development and understanding of single-site olefin polymerization catalysis (now a multi-billion dollar industry) as well as in the study of new materials having remarkable electrical, mechanical, interfacial and photonic properties.