Dreyfus Foundation awards $60,000 to Wade Downey for student fellowships in organic chemistry

May 22, 2014

The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation has presented C. Wade Downey, associate professor of chemistry at University of Richmond, a Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.

The award provides $60,000 over five years to advance research in the chemical sciences. Downey will use the award to fund student summer fellowships and supplies. He and his organic chemistry student research team work on “one pot” reactions, in which two or more chemical events occur in a single flask. The process eliminates expensive, low-yielding, environmentally unfriendly and time-consuming purification processes normally required between steps.

Downey’s work has been published in such journals as Tetrahedron Letters and The Journal of Organic Chemistry, with undergraduate students as co-authors.

Many of his students have gone on to graduate or medical school, with at least one being funded by a Goldwater Fellowship. Downey holds an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at MIT.

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