Chemistry professor receives Sloan Research Fellowship

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Ayers_Paul1.jpg” caption=”Paul Ayers, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry. “]There are few scientists who receive as distinguished an award as a Sloan Research Fellowship. Paul Ayers, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and a Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Chemical Biology, is one of those extraordinary young researchers. He will be awarded the Fellowship from Sept. 16, 2008 to Sept. 15, 2010, plus a two-year grant totaling $50,000 US to support his research.

“The prestige that an award of this calibre generates provides a great deal of research momentum,” said John Capone, dean of the Faculty of Science. “Already in his career, Dr. Ayers has generated a very strong track record of publications and international collaborations. This award will build even further on these significant accomplishments. We are most fortunate to have within our faculty such an exemplary researcher and we are very proud that his work has been acknowledged by the Sloan Foundation.”

The Fellowship was created in 1955 to provide support and recognition to scientists and scholars early in their careers. The goal of the Fellowship is to identify exceptional and independent young researchers who have the greatest potential to make significant contributions within their fields.

Only 118 Fellowships are awarded across North America every year, and of these, the field of Chemistry receives only 23 per year. This speaks to the quality of scientist the Sloan Foundation is seeking. Over the past 50 years, 35 Sloan Fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes later in their careers.

Originally from North Carolina, Ayers came to McMaster's Department of Chemistry in 2002 from Duke University where he was a post-doctoral associate.

“The chemistry department is delighted that Paul Ayers has won a Sloan Research Fellowship, arguably the most prestigious recognition accorded to an early career scientist in North America,” said Brian McCarry, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry. “The quality and variety of Paul's research output is simply astonishing and has already secured him a place on the international stage of theoretical chemistry.”

Ayers has a keen interest in many areas. In high school, he did internships in management and architecture, and later thought he would become a novelist, but both of his parents were chemistry professors.

The discussions around the dinner table must have had enough of an influence to eventually propel him in the direction of science, but even there, he pursued whatever interested him, including chemistry, mathematics and physics.

Ayers also has a natural desire to ask questions and find the answers using various theoretical methods. Thanks to his natural inquisitiveness, his research record to date is astounding.

His research focuses on developing new mathematical and computational methods for describing and predicting chemical reactions. Doing that requires an understanding of how chemical bonds fracture and form, which in turn requires understanding how the electrons that bind atoms into molecules rearrange during
chemical reactions.

“Using quantum mechanics to model the changes in electronic structure that accompany chemical reactions is the core of my research program,” explained Ayers. “But we want to go beyond just modeling: we want to understand what is happening at a qualitative level. The most unconventional facet of my research is its emphasis on developing new qualitative tools for understanding why chemical reactions happen.”

What seems unconventional to Ayers is what makes him exceptional to the rest of us. He has the innate ability to imagine the solution to the problem, and create the tools to prove it, by using a broad range of scientific knowledge.

Ayers points out that determining the right approach for attacking a scientific problem is perhaps more an art than a science.

“Both my sister and I played the violin as kids,” he explained. “Once I was told that while I was more technically proficient than she was, she had better 'musicality.' And now she is an accomplished professional musician. I think that doing good science is a bit like that. It isn't just technical proficiency because good science has an elegance — a 'beauty' — that transcends factual correctness.”