Chemistry Professors Elected to AAAS
December 2004
Chemistry professors Barry S. Cooperman and Virgil Percec have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The association is the world’s largest general scientific society and publishes the journal, Science.
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Cooperman is a prominent biological chemist who uses chemical, physical and biological tools to explore the relationship between biological structure and function in key enzymes. He has been teaching at Penn for more than three decades and is the former vice provost for research and past director of the French Institute. Among his honors, Cooperman has received the Merck Faculty Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a postdoctoral fellowship from NATO to study at the Pasteur Institute in France. Cooperman graduated magna cum laude from Columbia College before completing his Ph.D. at Harvard.
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Percec, who is the P. Roy Vagelos Professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, focuses his research on supramolecular chemistry. He is a fellow of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering, a division of the American Chemical Society. His other honors include the Polymer Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in the Netherlands, the Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists, a National Science Foundation Research Award for Exceptional Creativity in Research and honorary foreign membership in the Romanian Academy. He is also a member of the National Science Council (Taiwan). Percec came to Penn in 1999 from Case Western Reserve University, where he held the Leonard Case Jr. Chair of Macromolecular Science and Engineering. Educated in Romania, he received his B.S. and M.S. from the Polytechnic Institute of Jassy and his Ph.D. from the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Jassy.
Cooperman and Percec are among the 308 newly elected fellows who will be recognized at the AAAS annual meeting on February 19 in Washington, D.C.