Tetrahedron Symposium Speaker Biography

Dr Jacqueline Barton

Dr Jacqueline K. Barton is the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.  She is a native New Yorker.  Barton attended Barnard College (1974) and earned her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at Columbia University (1979).  After a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Laboratories and Yale University (1980), she became an assistant professor at Hunter College, City University of New York.  In 1983, she returned to Columbia University, becoming an associate professor of chemistry and biological sciences in 1985 and professor in 1986.  In the fall of 1989, she joined the faculty at Caltech.

Professor Barton has pioneered the application of transition metal complexes to probe recognition and reactions of double helical DNA.  She has designed chiral metal complexes that recognize nucleic acid sites with specificities rivaling DNA-binding proteins. Most recently, her research group has designed bulky metalloinsertors as site-specific probes of DNA base mismatches. Barton has also carried out seminal studies to elucidate electron transfer chemistry mediated by the DNA double helix. This chemistry has been applied in the development of DNA-based electrochemical sensors.  Barton is now focused on establishing how this chemistry is harnassed within the cell.

Barton has received numerous awards.  These include the NSF Waterman Award, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, the ACS Eli Lilly Award, the ACS Breslow Award, the Paul Karrer Medal, the ACS Nichols Medal, the ACS Gibbs Medal and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.  This past year she received the ACS Pauling Medal. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.  She has received eight honorary doctorates including, most recently, Yale University. She has, in addition, served the chemical community through her participation in ACS, governmental and industrial boards.