UNIST Professor Receives Prestigious Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Professor Bartosz A. Grzybowski)

Prof. Bartosz A. Grzybowski is a distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Bioengineering in the Department of Chemistry at UNIST. He is a Group Leader in the Center for Soft and Living Matter at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), as well as a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The award is in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of research on computer-assisted organic synthesis.

Prof. Grzybowski’s research focuses on computer-assisted organic synthesis. His investigations explore individual nano-objects and their static assemblies to focus on systems that perform desired functions. Applying this systems approach to organic synthesis, he developed a model that, after training on a diverse set of reactions, was able to accurately estimate the outcomes of organic reactions. Such data-driven analyses of chemical syntheses combined with network theory and Artificial Intelligence algorithms led to optimized pathways for completely de novo and fully automated design of syntheses of complex targets, culminating in the Chematica expert system to combine vast amounts of chemical knowledge and plan synthesis pathways toward both known and previously unexplored targets.

When asked about what receiving this award had meant to him, Prof. Grzybowski said, “I am truly honored by this recognition, and this is a tribute to the many students, postdocs, and colleagues who have helped me achieve my goals.” He adds, “Chematica allows chemists to focus their knowledge and creativity on harder questions by making the synthetic process shorter and way more economical. I hope it can provide answers to previously and currently unsolved problems in chemistry.”

The prize, first awarded in 1993, is an award given by the Foresight Institute every year to an individual whose recent work has most advanced the achievement of Feynman’s goal for nanotechnology, as exemplified by the late physicist Richard P. Feynman. It is given in two categories of nanotechnology, one for experiment and the other for theory.

The institute awarded a second Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology to Chair Prof. Franz J. Giessibl of the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics in the Department of Physics, University of Regensburg, Germany for his contributions to the fields of research on tip structure and atomic manipulation in scanning probe microscopy.