PHILADELPHIA -- Virgil Percec, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, will receive the American Chemical Society Award in Polymer Chemistry at the society 277th national meeting in Anaheim, Calif.  A prolific scientific author, Percec is recognized for the breadth of his creative work, from the discovery of cyclic and dendritic liquid crystals to the synthesis of self-assembling chemicals that can spontaneously form organized structures.  

Following a symposium today in his honor, Percec will receive his award and discuss how new concepts in polymer chemistry can be found by examining nature as a model for synthetic systems.  

After defecting from Romania in 1981, Percec completed his postdoctoral research at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and the University of Akron, in Ohio.  He was a faculty member of Case Western Reserve University before coming to Penn in 1999.

At Penn, Percec has strived to strike a balance among a diversity of interrelated disciplines from organic, bioorganic, macromolecular and supramolecular chemistrty, seeking to understand, mimic and extend nature's solutions to the design of synthetic functional nanosystems.

Percec has been recognized through numerous awards internationally. In 1993, he was elected a foreign member of the Romanian Academy, and, in 1997, he won the Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists.  In 2002, he received the Polymer Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in the Netherlands.  Percec is the author of more than 530 publications, 800 invited and endowed lectures and 32 patents, and he is currently serving on the editorial board of 17 journals and as editor of the Journal of Polymer Science.

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