The Arthur K. Doolittle Award recognizes an outstanding talk presented during a PMSE symposium at each of the Fall and Spring ACS National Meetings. The award has two awardees, one per meeting. Originally established by the Union Carbide Corporation as the Carbide Award, its name was later changed due to Arthur K. Dootlittle’s contribution to the ACS Division of PMSE, the field of polymeric materials, and financial contributions from royalties of his book, Technology of Solvents and Plasticizers. All oral PMSE presentations are eligible for nomination by symposium organizers on the basis of content with emphasis on originality, impact, and development of new concepts in polymeric materials. Recipients are selected by an anonymous panel of judges appointed by the PMSE Doolittle Award Committee. We are pleased to announce the winner of the Doolittle Award from the Spring 2024 ACS meeting, Professor Tae-Lim Choi.
PROFESSOR TAE-LIM CHOI
ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Universal Suzuki Catalyst-transfer Polymerization for Precision Synthesis of Donor/Acceptor Conjugated Polymers
Tae-Lim Choi was born in Seoul, 1977. He obtained his BS from KAIST in 1999, and PhD from Caltech under the supervision of Bob Grubbs, in 2003. He then moved to UC Berkeley as a post-doc researcher under the guidance of Jean Fréchet until 2004. He returned to S. Korea and worked at Cheil Industries, Samsung, for four years. In 2008, he started his independent career as an assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry, Seoul National University. He was promoted to full professor in 2017. In 2022, he moved to the Department of Materials at ETH, Zürich as a Professor of Polymer Chemistry. His research interests lie heavily on synthesis, focusing on developing new methods (living, cascade or diversity-oriented polymerizations, etc.) to synthesize various macromolecules including new conjugated polymers and understanding their mechanisms. Recently, his focus has moved to applying these synthetic tools towards self-assembly of conjugated polymers to prepare various semiconducting nanostructures.
Tae-Lim has received the following awards: Herbert Newby McCoy Award (2004, Best Thesis in the Department of Chemistry at Caltech); Chungam Young Investigator Fellowship (2010, POSCO Foundation), Outstanding Research Achievement Award, Ministry of Education, Science & Technology, Republic of Korea; Presidential Young Scientists Award; President of the Republic of Korea (2014); Distinguished Lectureship Award, Chemical Society of Japan (2013); Young Organic Chemists Award from KCS Organic Chemistry Division (2015); Asian Rising Star Lectureship Award, The 18th Asian Chemical Congress (2019); Polymer Chemistry Award, Polymer Chemistry Division, Korean Chemical Society (2021); and Hanseong Science Award (2023). He is a member of the Young Korean Academy of Science and Technology. Between 2013 and 2022, he served as an editor of Journal of Polymer Science and is currently on the editorial advisory boards of Angew. Chemie. (Wiley-VCH).