The ACS Division of Organic Chemistry is pleased to announce that the 2024 Paul G. Gassman Distinguished Service Award has been bestowed upon Professor Lisa McElwee-White.
Professor Lisa McElwee-White is the Colonel Allen R. and Margaret G. Crow Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida. She received her BS in chemistry from the University of Kansas in 1979 and a PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1983 under the direction of Dennis Dougherty. She then completed postdoctoral studies with James Collman at Stanford University and began her independent career there in 1985. In 1993, she moved to the University of Florida (UF) as an associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 1997. While at UF, she served as Associate Dean for Administrative Affairs, the Director of the Beckman Scholars program, and is currently the Chair of the Chemistry Department.
The Paul G. Gassman Award Distinguished Service Award has been bestowed upon Professor McElwee-White for her many significant contributions to the Division of Organic Chemistry (DOC) and the organic chemistry community through several prominent elected and appointed roles. For example, as a member of the DOC’s Executive Committee, she served as national Program Chair, Member-at-Large, and Chair. From 2006 to 2024 she, along with Professor Huw Davies, organized the annual Academic Young Investigators symposia, which provides a stage for assistant professors to showcase their work. Professor McElwee-White has also served as a member of several editorial advisory boards for prominent journals including, the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Organometallics, and ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, as well as the Committee of Visitors for the NSF Chemistry Division and myriad ACS committees. Professor McElwee-White’s research focuses on applying organometallic chemistry to materials deposition, including chemical vapor and focused electron- and ion beam-induced depositions. A particular focus of her work is mechanism-based design of single source precursors for these materials.
Professor McElwee-White is a Fellow of both the American Chemical Society and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Her awards include the ACS’s Francis P. Garvin- John M. Olin Medal, and the Charles H. Herty Medal (Georgia Section ACS), the Florida Award (Florida Section ACS) and the Charles H. Stone Award (Carolina-Piedmont Section ACS).