UW student wins Chemical Society Sigal Fellowship

The American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, has awarded the 2004-2006 Irving S. Sigal Postdoctoral Fellowship to Matthew G. Woll, a graduate student at UW–Madison.

Woll already received the 2002 ACS Organic Division Graduate Fellowship and the 2003 Excellence in Research Award from the UW–Madison. He currently is completing his doctoral research with Professor Samuel Gellman in the Department of Chemistry.

Woll will begin his postdoctoral studies in August at Harvard University in the laboratory of Eric Jacobsen. He will be studying the use of synthetic catalysts that mimic their natural counterparts, and which will be more broadly useful in synthetic organic chemistry. With this method, it may be possible to make better medicines and to do so with less environmental impact, researchers theorize.

Named in memory of Irving S. Sigal, a chemist who died in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the postdoctoral fellowship is awarded each year to a scientist whose work addresses a significant problem involving both chemistry and biology. The award is given every two years to scientists of all nationalities who have earned or will earn doctoral degrees from a graduate chemistry department in the United States.

Sigal was a medicinal chemist working at Merck & Co. Inc. when he died at the age of 35. In 1995, Sigal’s widow, Catherine T. Sigal, established the fellowship that is currently valued at $45,000 per year. Sigal, herself a biochemist, is employed by the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation of New York City.