The Suslick-Sessler Lecture in Materials Chemistry was established in 2017 by a generous lead gift from Dr. Jonathan L. Sessler, the Doherty-Welch Chair Professor of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, in honor of his colleague Kenneth S. Suslick, the Marvin T. Schmidt Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Jonathan L. Sessler
Born in Urbana, Illinois, in May of 1956, Jonathan L. Sessler received his BS with highest honors in 1977 from UC Berkeley and his PhD from Stanford in 1982 with Prof. J. P. Collman. He was an NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. J.-M. Lehn at L'Université Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg and a JSPS Visiting Scientist with Prof. Tabushi in Kyoto. He started in 1984 at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is currently the Doherty-Welch Chair Professor. Dr. Sessler has authored or coauthored over 640 research publications, co-authored two books, edited another, and been an inventor of record on 75 issued U.S. Patents. Dr. Sessler is a co-founder of Pharmacyclics, Inc., a publicly traded company before its acquisition in 2015 by AbbVie for $21 billion. Dr. Sessler has been elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the RSC, and the AAAS; he has received the ACS Cope Scholar Award, RSC Centenary Prize, Izatt-Christensen Award in Macrocyclic Chemistry, the Sidney Pollack Award of Technion University, and the Fischer Award of the Society of Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines.
Kenneth S. Suslick
The Marvin T. Schmidt Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Professor Kenneth S. Suslick was born in Chicago in September of 1952, received his BS from the California Institute of Technology in 1974 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1978 under Prof. J. P. Collman, and came to the University of Illinois immediately thereafter. He has published more than 420 papers, edited four books, and holds 56 patents and patents pending.
He is the recipient of the Centenary Prize and the Sir George Stokes Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry; the MRS Medal from the Materials Research Society; the Hildebrand Award, the Nobel Laureate Signature Award, and the Senior Cope Scholar Award from the ACS; the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Medal from the Acoustical Society of America; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an NIH Research Career Development Award; a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship; and the Silver Medal of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce; he is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACS, RSC, MRS, APS, and the Acoust. Soc. Amer. He is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. In 2018-19, Suslick was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College.