Watch out U. of C.! Northwestern is gaining on you! Give the north siders a few years, and there’ll be purple shirts covered with the names of Nobel Prize winners, too!
Stoddart has been a member of the Northwestern faculty since 2008; he was at the University of Birmingham in England when he developed the rotaxane. (He has also taught at the University of Sheffield, also in England, and at UCLA.) But he emphasized that scientific research is a continuum and that discoveries often develop in unexpected ways. “We do many things,” he said. “We feed off each other.” Currently, he said, he and his students, both current and former, are using molecular machines to develop new forms of drug delivery, ways of mining for gold without using cyanide, and skin creams.
