The Nature Of The Mechanical Bond: From Molecules To Machines

Carson J. Bruns is a Miller Research Fellow in the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He attended Luther College (2004–2008) where he earned degrees in chemistry, religion, and mathematics. He received a PhD in organic chemistry from Northwestern University (2008–2013), where he was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow. Researching in the United States, Thailand, Korea, and Japan, he has co-authored more than 30 publications which have collectively been cited more than 1000 times. His research interests span all aspects of the mechanical bond, from fundamental science to applied chemical technologies.

J. Fraser Stoddart, presently a Board of Trustees Professor at Northwestern University, was previously (1997–2002) the Saul Winstein Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) before holding the Fred Kavli Chair of NanoSystems Sciences at UCLA while he was the Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) from 2002–2007. By contributing to the introduction of the mechanical bond into molecules, he is one of a few contemporary chemists to have opened up an entirely new field of chemistry in which he has pioneered the development of mechanically interlocked molecules (MIMs) including bistable catenanes and rotaxanes that have made their way into molecular electronic devices and drug delivery vehicles. His current research interests include the design and synthesis of emergent systems and artificial molecular machines that operate away-from-equilibrium.