Illinois chemist wins national award for high-tech materials

Chemist Tobin Marks of Evanston, Ill., will be honored April 3 by the world's largest scientific society for his innovative research with materials useful for plastic transistors and display screens, solar cells, light-based telecommunications and other applications. He will receive the 2001 Award in the Chemistry of Materials from the American Chemical Society at its national meeting in San Diego.

"What fascinates me is connecting - and in precise fashion - molecule-sized building blocks to create entirely new substances with unprecedented properties," said Marks, a chemistry and materials science professor at Northwestern University.

He is both designer and builder. High-tech molecular structures made in his laboratory include:

• organic wires, to carry electricity as in transistors;
• molecular "light bulbs," to light up display images for flexible TV screens and other devices;
• switches, for sending huge amounts of communications information over fiber optic lines;
• materials to enable more efficient solar energy cells; and
• plastics that are stronger, more ecologically friendly and more recyclable.

Marks calls himself a materials chemist, a new, rapidly expanding area of science that combines chemistry, materials science and physics.

"In high school, I was interested in many things," he said. "But the unifying theme was what substances contained, what made them tick, and how they could be modified to make them more useful."

Marks received his undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland in 1966 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He is a member of the ACS divisions of inorganic and polymer chemistry as well as its division of polymeric materials, science and engineering.

The ACS Award in the Chemistry of Materials is sponsored by E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., which established the award in 1988 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the commercialization of nylon and the discovery of Teflon.