Moore Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

4/27/2008

Prof. Jeffrey Moore has been elected as a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences among 190 new members for 2008.

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CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Jeffrey Moore, the Murchison-Mallory Professor of Chemistry at Illinois, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The 190 newly elected fellows will be honored at the annual Induction Ceremony on Oct. 11 at academy headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Professor Jeffery Moore photo by L. Brian Stauffer
Professor Jeffery Moore photo by L. Brian Stauffer

Professor Jeffery Moore photo by L. Brian Stauffer

Other new members this year include Richard Herman, chancellor of the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, U.S. Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, two-time cabinet secretary and former White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Academy Award-winning filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen and Milos Forman, Emory University Provost and historian Earl Lewis, Darwin biographer Janet Browne, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edwards P. Jones, and blues guitarist B.B. King.

Moore, who collaborated with two other U. of I. researchers to develop self-healing plastics, most recently worked with them on another invention: a new way of doing chemistry.

Moore and colleagues Nancy Sottos, a professor of materials science and engineering, and Scott White, a professor of aerospace engineering, have found a novel way to manipulate matter and drive chemical reactions along a desired direction. The new technique utilizes mechanical force to alter the course of chemical reactions and yield products not obtainable through conventional conditions.

Potential applications include materials that more readily repair themselves, or clearly indicate when they have been damaged.

"This is a fundamentally new way of doing chemistry," said Moore, who also is a researcher at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory on campus and at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected as members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes some 200 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Adapted from UI News Bureau: Jeff Unger, 217-333-1085.

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This story was published April 27, 2008.