Andrew Gellman Receives Kaufman Foundation Award

Two Carnegie Mellon University professors have received awards from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation. Huaiying Zhang, assistant professor of Biological Sciences received a New Investigator Award and Andrew Gellman, the Lord Professor of Chemical Engineering and co-director Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation received a New Initiatives Award.

"Charles Kaufman was a visionary in recognizing that collaborative and interdisciplinary research could lead to huge quality-of-life improvements across the landscape of human experience," said Lisa Schroeder, president and CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation in announcing the grants. "He committed his philanthropy to our foundation to ensure that what was funded followed that vision, and I believe these grants are evidence that the Scientific Advisory Board has done just that. The funded projects offer real prospects for breakthroughs."

Under the New Initiatives Award, Gellman and his collaborator David Waldeck, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, will study and manipulate chiral molecules via application of magnetic fields, with the goal of using this understanding to improve production of chiral pharmaceuticals. The proposed project, "Spin chemistry as the basis for enantioselective surface chemistry," aims to demonstrate and understand the influence of magnetic fields on the enantiospecific interactions of chiral molecules with magnetic surfaces. Ultimately, this phenomenon can be used to develop new chemical processes that differentiate between enantiomers.

Much like a pair of hands, chiral molecules exist in two structures, known as enantiomers, that are mirror-images of one another. The problem is that many important pharmaceuticals are chiral molecules that are synthesized as mixtures of both enantiomers. However, life on Earth is homochiral, meaning that all sugars, DNA, amino acids, and proteins exist in only one of their two enantiomeric forms. The consequence is that when chiral pharmaceuticals are administered without consideration of their "handedness," one enantiomer may be therapeutic while the other is toxic — as in the infamous case of thalidomide. The aim of Gellman's project is to explore and develop a new approach that will enable direct synthesis of the therapeutic enantiomer alone.

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