Donna Blackmond probes the mechanisms of organic reactions, in particular asymmetric catalysis. She pioneered the methodology of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis for streamlining both fundamental and applied organic chemistry research.
Her research also involves studies of the origin of biological homochirality, a fundamental signature of life on earth. This work aims to understand how the single chirality of peptides and nucleic acids emerged from the amino acid and sugar building blocks of life.
She is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. She has been recognized internationally for her research including the Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, and a Humboldt-Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Prof. Blackmond was a Simons Investigator in the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life and has been an invited speaker at two Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Nobel Workshops.
