College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Organic honoree

Chemistry's Richard Larock has been recognized by the American Chemical Society.
Since his arrival at Iowa State in 1972, Richard Larock has continually been recognized for his teaching and research efforts.

Early in his career, he was named a fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and was a recipient of a DuPont Young Faculty Award. More recently in 1997 and 1998, he received Merck Academic Development Awards

In 1998, the Board of Regents, State of Iowa, honored Larock with the Regents Faculty Excellence Award and a year later he was named a university professor of chemistry.

Along the way, Larock found time to author four books, write nearly 250 papers, produce more than 30 patents and make fundamental advancements in organopalladium chemistry that are useful in the pharmaceutical, chemical and agricultural industries and the development of novel new bioplastics.

So it should come as no surprise that the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Division of Organic Chemistry has recently named Larock as the recipient of the Edward Leete Award for outstanding contributions to teaching and research in organic chemistry. The award was presented to Larock at the ACS fall meeting in New York City in early September.

The award is named in honor of Edward Leete, a former chemistry professor at the University of Minnesota who, through his contributions to science and education, fostered an appreciation and love for organic chemistry.

"This is a very nice recognition," Larock said. "It tells me that my peers think I have contributed not only to research, but teaching as well."

Larock feels that his book, Comprehensive Organic Transformations: A Guide to Functional Group Preparations, is a major reason why he is receiving the Leete Award. Now in its second edition, the mammoth publication (over 2600 pages) has evolved from a series of handouts that Larock used when he first started teaching organic synthesis at Iowa State in the early '70s.

"Those handouts grew and grew until I published the first edition of my book in 1989 and the second in 1999," he said.

Comprehensive Organic Transformations is used world-wide by organic chemistry students and career chemists in academia and industry. It has become the "bible for organic synthetic methodology," according to Larock. It has also become an academic bestseller.

"It's very rewarding to know that not only researchers, but graduate students around the world are learning chemistry from my book," he said.

In early September, Larock was also named a 2004 recipient of a Cope Senior Scholar Award by the ACS. That award recognizes his many contributions to research in organic chemistry. It comes with a cash award and a $40,000 research grant and will be awarded to Larock at the fall 2004 ACS national meeting.

These days Larock is focused on his research efforts, which have been devoted to actively developing a number of new synthetic organic methods utilizing palladium as a catalyst to prepare a wide variety of carbocycles and heterocycles. Palladium is a metal that is very useful in organic synthetics due to its tremendous versatility and its ability to promote a wide range of different reactions when using only minute catalytic amounts.

"Our methodology is presently being used by a number of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world to prepare indoles, which are useful as migraine headache drugs," Larock said.

He was the first researcher to widely employ organopalladium intermediates in organic synthesis and he has reported a tremendous array of organic reactions using palladium as a catalyst. In the past year, the Larock group has published 27 papers and is on a pace to exceed that this year, despite graduating five Ph.D. students and one master’s student in the past year.

In recent years, Larock has also been very active in the preparation and characterization of novel new elastomers and plastics from natural oils, like soybean, corn and fish oils. These materials have excellent thermal, mechanical, damping and shape memory properties, which many petroleum-based plastics do not process.

"I enjoy the teaching part of my job, but I still get the most excitement out of research," he said. "I still get excited when a student comes in and says they got some new reaction to work."