Source: School of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Written by: School of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Photo by: Zhong Haolun
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On June 7, 2017, the 16th Session of Nobel Laureates Series Lectures at Sun Yat-sen University was held in Swasey Hall on Guangzhou South Campus. The series lectures are organized by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, the Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs of Guangdong Province, and Sun Yat-sen University. Sir James Fraser Stoddart, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016, was invited to give a lecture entitled “Serendipity Strikes Twice: Emergence Opens up a Whole New World of Winders”.
The lecture was hosted by Prof. Albert S. C. Chan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, professor at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Sun Yat-sen University. The State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs sent a letter of congratulation, which was read by Ms. YANG Peijun, deputy director-general of the Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs of Guangdong Province. Prof. XIAO Haipeng, Vice President of Sun Yat-sen University, delivered a welcome speech. About 300 faculty and students from the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Chemistry, School of Life Sciences, School of Materials Science and Engineering, and School of Medicine attended the lecture. 

During the lecture, Professor Stoddart shared two stories of cyclodextrin projects. His group occasionally discovered a kind of fantastic crystal while studying the host-guest interaction of cyclodextrin, and opened up new areas of applications of such kind of molecules in eatable metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and gold enrichment. In his point of view, chemistry is always the discipline full of amazement. The researchers in chemistry should be keen on exploring the unknown academic field. In the Q&A session, Prof. Stoddart earned many rounds of applause by answering students' and teachers' questions with patience and care.

Sir James Fraser Stoddart works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology and has developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes, and rotaxanes utilizing molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He has demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches. In 2016, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.